A hybrid cricket-baseball game reportedly introduced in Chicago in 1870. The game is described as generally having cricket rules, except with no LBW rule, and with the addition of a third base, so that the bases form a triangle with sides of 28-yards. We have no other accounts of this game.

Full text:

"A NEW AMERICAN GAME

The Philadelphia Mercury contains the following: 'A new game of ball has recently been introduced in Chicago, under the name of American cricket. The field is laid out like a cricket-field, and the striker wields the willow instead of the ash. The bowler, who stands twenty-two yards from the striker, bowls as in cricket. The striker, in making a tally, runs to first base and then to third (dispensing with the second), these being in the form of a triangle and at a distance of twenty-eight yards apart. There are no fouls to cause delays. There are none of the stupid and senseless six-ball 'overs.' 'Out leg before wicket' is dispensed with, a rule which, while in force, gives great annoyance to the umpire and general dissatisfaction to the batsman. The prominent and attractive features of both the English game of cricket and the American pastime of base-ball are taken and rolled into one, thereby making a magnificent game.'"

Sources:

Reportedly in the Philadelphia Mercury.An account of the article appeared in the Penny Illustrated Paper (London), December 17, 1870 (page 370).Contributed by Tom Shieber, email of 2/25/2009.

This game is cited -- ("this contrived game proved to be acceptable to no one and was quickly forgotten") in Tom Melville, The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America (Bowling Green State University Press, 1998), page 149. Melville attributes the introduction of the game to game to J. Wood, secretary of the Chicago Cricket Club.

Protoball does not have a Philadelphia Mercury source for this report.

From the 1860s to the 1880s, Navahos in NM played a gmae that evolved from one (possibly the Massachusetts game?) taught to them on a NM reservation mannned by the US Cavalry. This game is recalled as involving plugging, very feisty baserunning customs, no foul ground, four strikes, one-out-side-out innings, and multiple batters at the same time.

In 1805 a game of “bace” was reportedly played among adult males in New York City. Its rules were not reported. The word “bace” is extremely rare in sport: it appeared in a 1377 English document, and, in a list of obsolete Cornish terms, for the game Prisoner’s Base in Cornwall in 1882. Unlike the usual case for prisoner’s base, however, a final score [41-35] was reported for this match.

"Bace" is also reported as an obolete term for a British game, the nature of which is not yet known.

Sources:

See Protoball Chronology entries 1805.4 and 1805.5.The game was reported in the New York Evening Post of April 13, 1805.

Elmore (1922) describes this as a game of attrition for ages 8-12 that involves throwing a ball against a wall. One player is named to catch it. If the player does, “stand” is shouted, and other players are to freeze in their places. If the player with the ball can plug someone, that player is out; if not, the thrower is out. This game has not batting or baserunning.

per Perrin (1902). A school-time running game of one-on-one contests between a pitcher and a batter, who propels the tossed ball with the hand and runs bases while the pitcher retrieves the ball. Caught flies and a failure to reach third base before the pitcher touches home with the ball in hand are outs. Batters receive one point for each base attained, and five for a home run. Three-out half innings are used.

Ball-bias, a term as yet only found in seven scattered British sources from 1856 to 1898, was evidently the name of a batting-running game in the south-east of England.

David Block, who came across the game in 2013, tentatively concludes that, unlike early English base-ball, ball-bias probably used a bat. The 1898 source's description: "ball-bias, a running game much like 'rounders,' played with a ball."

Most references to ball-bias appear from 1856 to 1880 in newspaper accounts of school picnics or church outings in the vicinity of the Sussex-Kent border south of London.

The rules of the game are not well understood. Block writes that "It appears that ball-bias was distinct from other baseball-related, locally-based games that I'd discovered in 19th century England. These included Tut-Ball, played in the Sheffield area, and Pize Ball that was mostly found in the vicinity of Leeds. These latter games were played without a bat, like English base-ball, whereas . . . ball-bias falls more in the bat-using category, alongside rounders."

We have no present evidence that this game preceded English base-ball.

Sources:

See David Block, "Base-Ball-Bias," December 2013 issue of the Next Destin'd Post (volume 2, number 7), page 1ff.

per Block. The 1836 book Perth Traditions described Ball-Paces, by then almost extinct, as a game that used a trap to put a ball into play, at which point in-team runners at each of four bases run to the next bases, stopping only when the ball was returned to the original batsman’s station. There is no mention of plugging.

per Dick, 1864. A team game like rounders, but having large safety areas instead of posts or bases. A feeder makes a short gentle toss to a batter, who tries to hit it. The batter-runner then chooses whether to run for a distant goal-line or a nearer one, for which there is a smaller chance of being plugged. The nearer station can hold several runners at once. Three missed swings makes an out, as does a caught fly. Versions of Ball-Stock are found in British and American boys’ books in the mid-Nineteenth Century.

Sources:

Dick, ed., The American Boys Book of Sports and Games: A Practical Guide to Indoor and Outdoor Amusements(Dick and Fitzgerald [reprinted by Lyons Press, 2000], 1864)., pages 112-113.

Translated as “rounders” in an 1855 translation of a French poem. Maigaard identifies it as a longball-type game with four bases [set in a line] and in which the ball is thrown into the field by a member of the in team to initiate play.

A fungo-like game played in Elizabethan times in England. The ball was an inflated leather bag, and was knocked with the arm - sometimes aided by a wooden brace. Hitting for distance was evidently desired, but no running or fielding is described.

A two-player game set against a wall or barn. The pitch is made from about ten feet away against the wall, and the batter tries to hit it on the rebound. If successful, he runs to the wall and back. If he misses the ball, and the pitcher catches the rebounding pitch on the fly or on one bound, the batter is out. XX add cite XX. Beard (1896) calls a similar game House Ball. It specifies a brick house, perhaps for the peace of mind of occupants.

Sources:

D. C. Beard, The American Boy’s Book of Sport(Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1896), pages 341-342.

Sometimes, a name for base ball. While some references to “base” most likely denote Prisoner’s Base (a team form of tag similar in nature to modern Capture the Flag and today’s Laser Tag), others denote a ball game. David Block reports that the earliest clear appearance of “base” as a ball game is from New England in 1831, and that the source groups base with cricket and cat as young men’s ballgames.

The term “old fashioned base ball” appears to have been used in the decades after the 1850s to describe whatever game was played locally before the New York game arrived. The term was used extensively in upstate New York and New Jersey. We are still uncertain as to whether OFBB had common rules. In Western New York State, OFBB seems to align with the old form of the Massachusetts game, but prior to the codification of Mass Game rules in 1858. It is possible that the term was used for diverse variations of local safe-haven games in other areas.

One might speculate that later still, such games would be thought of as “town ball.”

Sources:

One investigation of Old Fashioned Base Ball is at Astifan and McCray, "'Old-Fashioned Base Ball' in Western New York, 1825-1860," Base Ball, volume 2 number 2 (Fall 2008), pages 26-34.

Elmore (1922) describes this game as a form of Square Ball (Corner Ball) for 7th graders through high schoolers in which a player can prevent being called out by catching a ball thrown at him. An “indoor baseball” is used. The game involves no batting or baserunning.

America’s national pastime since about 1860. Writing about rounders in 1898, Gomme mused that “An elaborate form of this game has become the national game of the United States.” The term “baseball” actually arose in England as early as 1748, referring to a simple game like rounders, but usage in England died out, and was soon forgotten in most parts of the country. The term first appeared in the United States in 1791.

The first known game of base ball played on ice skates occurred on in January 1861 near Rochester NY. Skating was very popular, and the hybrid game was played in the late 1800s.

A few special rules are known from the 1880s, a key one being that runnders were not at risk when they overskated a base. Deliveries were pitches, not throws; a dead ball was used and the bound rule was in effect. A ten-player team deployed a left shortstop and a right shortstop.

Baste, or baste ball, may simply be a variant spelling of base ball. The most famous US usage is in a Princeton student’s diary entry for 1786 (5 years before the first known use of "base ball" in the US), which reveals only that the game involves catching and hitting. Note: Princeton was known as the College of New Jersey until 1896.

As of February 2017, Protoball knows of only three US uses of the term Baste: the Princeton diary, in an account of President Benjamin Harrison's teen years around 1850, and in Tennessee in 1874. Further input is welcome.

In early 2017,David Block summarized his English research findings: "Regarding 'baste,' I have seen at least two dozen examples of the term 'baste-ball' used in England in the 18th and 19th centuries. It's clear from context that this was an alternate spelling of base-ball, along with bass-ball. I don't doubt the same was true for the few instances of baste-ball's use in America."

A superficial Google search for <baste pastime game> in February 2017 throws no further light on ballplaying forms of baste. A somewhat primitive tagging game for children -- Baste the Bear -- in Europe and England is known, but does not appear to be consistent with US finds reported to Protoball.

Sources:

See Protoball Chronology entry 1786.1.A second entry, 1848c.9, includes baste ball in a list of boyhood games played by future US President Benjamin Harrison. A third entry, 1874.2, reports its use as a game played in Chattanooga TN.

We have references to bat-ball from 1791 (when it was banned in both Pittsfield and Northampton MA), but the basic rules of this game as first played are unclear. Writers have diversely compared it to bandy, to schlagball, and to punchball. It is clear that a club was not always required for hitting, as the ball could instead be slapped into play by the hand.

Sources:

See Protoball Chronology entries for 1791.

D Wise and S. Forrest, Great Big Book of Children’s Games (McGraw-Hill, 2003), pages 219-220.

Baseball for blind players. The balls emit beeps, and a base buzzes once a ball is hit. Runners are out if the ball is fielded before they reach base. Sighted players serve as pitcher and catcher for the batting team, but cannot field. There is a national association for the game, and annual World Series have been held since 1976.

per Fraser (1975) - A game played in Dundee, Scotland, in about 1900 and later understood as a “corruption of baseball.” Balls were hit with the hand instead of a bat, and the game evidently sometimes used plugging.

[A] in the 1670s, Francis Willughby listed hornebillets on his compilation of games, or "plaies." Of all his games, this game description closest to base ball and cricket -- resembling the o'cat games with two or four or six players -- but it employs a section of animal horn, or a sort stick, and not a ball.

[B] "Thomas Wright's 1857 Dict. of Obsolete and Provincial English(v. 1 p. 210) lists as the third meaning for "billet" the game of Tip-Cat and connects it to Derbyshire."

[C] Responding to John Thorn's Our Game blog on 2/26/2013, Clive Williams wrote that trap ball "is a very similar game to one my brother encountered near Halifax, Yorkshire about 50 years ago. In Yorkshire the game was called I think 'Billets' and he was never able to make it clear whether the piece to be struck was a round wooden ball or just a small chunk of hardwood of no particular shape. What you had to do, as is mentioned in the article is to make sure that nobody can catch the wooden article so getting the direction and the height right with a sort of weapon like a walking stick (cane) must have been tricky."

Maigaard (1941) notes they while most forms of rounders and longball are now lost, three - baseball, cricket, and bo-ball - remain vigorous. He places Bo-Ball in Finland. The only known source on this game, called Lahden Mailaveikot in Finnish, is a Finnish-language website, one that shows photographs of a vigorous game with aluminum bats, gloves, helmets, and much sliding and running but no solid hints for English-speakers about the nature of the game. Similarities to Pesapallo, including the gentle form of pitching, are apparent.

per Perrin (1902) – Apparently an indoor game derived from baseball. A member of the in-team throws the ball to an area guarded by the pitcher, and runs if and when the ball passes through. There is tagging but no plugging.

The game of bowlywicket, played at least as late as 1980, resembled a poor man's cricket, and used a broomhandle, three empty soda cans piled one-on-two, and a common "pinky" drugstore ball. Batters defend the teetering cans, and run to a second base to score runs.

It has been played in the city of Fall River MA, often by immigrants from France and Brazil, and may have evolved from a game played by workers from English cities in the late 1800s.

per Bronner [1997]. Using three sidewalk squares, a “pitcher” throws the ball into the box closest to his opponent, who tries to slap the ball into the box closest to the pitcher. If he missed the box or the pitcher catches ball on the fly, it is an out. There is no baserunning. Also called “Boxball.”

A Swedish game, also played in Germany and Denmark. A batting and running game with four bases, this game involved fungo-style hitting to start a play. As in some forms of longball, a base can be occupied by more than one runner. A caught fly ball gives a point to the out team, but the runner is not thereby retired. Innings are timed. A home run is six points. A 90-degree fair territory is employed. This game may relate to Swedeball, a game reportedly played in the US upper midwest. It has been reported that that Brannboll is played in Minnesota, but no such references are known.

This adult game, sometimes referred to as Welsh Baseball (in Wales) and English Baseball (ii Liverpool England), has been played since the early 1900s, reportedly reaching a high point in the late 1930s. Something of a blend of modern baseball with some cricket features, it is known in Liverpool England and in Cardiff and Newport in Wales.

Owing to cricket, presumably, the game has no foul ground, comprises two (all-out-side-out) innings, teams of 11 players, and flat bats. 42-inch posts are used instead of bases. Underarm pitching is required. Runs are counted for each base attained by a batter (one run for a single, two for a double, etc.). Batters are required to keep a foot in contact with a peg in the batting area.

An annual "international game" has been played between a Liverpool team and one from Wales. In the 1920s crowds of over 10,000 were reported to attend the international context.

Martin Johnes writes that both the Liverpool game and the Welsh game likely evolved from rounders, with some local variation. In 1927 they agreed to common rules for their international game; Liverpool had restricted the placement of batters' feet and used one-handed batting, while Wales saw two-handed batting and less restricted batter placement.

Liverpool had been very active in rounders in the 19th century, they and the Welsh but switched to use the term "baseball" in 1892, possibly to distinguish the adult game from juvenile rounders play. A common set of rules was agreed to between the two governing groups in 1927.

Adult play in Liverpool is not thriving: from the website of the English Baseball Association, accessed 4/1/2016: "Sadly the game in Liverpool is in a very poor state and we have very few senior teams remaining.The junior game is where our game needs to grow and we still need to get a bit more interest as we try to generate interest with the youth in the Liverpool area.

"Through the help of schools, youth clubs, junior football teams or any other individuals willing to play the game we hope the game can survive for another 100 years."

Sources:

Andrew Weltch, "British Baseball: How a Curious Version of the Game Survives in Parts of England and Wales, The National Pastime, (SABR) volume 28 (2008), pages 34-38.

per Brewster [1953]. “Basemen” stand at each corner of a bounded field of play, and try to plug other players inside the bounds. Each player has three “eyes” [lives]. A player loses an “eye” if plugged or if a target player catches a ball thrown at him. There is no batting or baserunning in this game.

Bunt is downsized baseball. One reported Massachusetts version was a one-on-one game in which any hit ball that reached the not-distant field perimeter was an out. The batter ran out hit balls, and the pitcher fielded them, but thereafter base advancement was done by ghost [imaginary] runners. Terrie Dopp Aamodt reports playing a similar game as an adolescent girl.

per Appel [1999]. Appel reports that the young Mike Kelly, growing up on Washington DC in the late 1860’s, first played Burn Ball, a form of base ball that included "plugging" or "burning" of baserunners by thrown balls.

"The game in California has some curious features, it seems. A game played in Woodbridge, May 26, had ten men on a side, the extra played being a "2d c.," or sort of backstop put behind the regular to nip fouls and prevent passed balls. The game was ten innings, though there was no tie on the ninth, the score was 24 to 20, and the winners, the Eagles of San Francisco, won $50 and a silver cake-basket. The latter implement would seem to be rather useless to a ball club."

Richard Hershberger noted, October 2015: "This is immediately recognizable as Chadwick's beloved ten-men ten-inning rule, though Chadwick placed the tenth man at right short rather than second catcher. We know that Cuban baseball adopted the rule, apparently taking at face value Chadwick's assurances that it was inevitable and not noticing for some time that it had not in fact been enacted. Did this happen in California too? Or is this an isolated instance? I don't know much about California ball at this time, but the Eagles of San Francisco were a major club, weren't they? Or is that no longer true by 1877?"

A game in which a ball is tossed up among players and one player’s name is then called out. That player must obtain the ball and try to hit fleeing compatriots with it. Newell [1883] notes that this game was played in Austria.

Sources:

William Wells Newell, Games and Songs of American Children(New York: Dover [1963 reprint], 1883)., page 181.

The New York Clipper reported two 1860 games in southernmost Ontario as "the Canadian game" between the Ingersoll and Woodstock clubs [add locations?].

The playing rules for this game are not given [is there anything beside the 11 player sides that signals that it's unusual?].

In May 2015, William Humber re-examined other accounts of Canadian ballplaying, and suggests/hypothesizes/concludes that seven playing conventions/rules/practices may have distinguished it from other North American predecessor games:

[1] Eleven players.

[2] All-out-side out innings.

[3] Two innings to be played.

(Note that these three rules are familiar cricket rules)

[4] Use of four bases, in addition to home base

[5] The plugging of baserunners when away from bases

[6] Throwing, not pitching to batsmen

[7] 40-foot bases [sic?], with first base [how?] close to home

In drawing up this list, Humber drew on the Clipper articles, recollections of Adam Ford that may have come from his own playing days from 1848 to 1855, and a Clipper account of a 1859 game played by [a London ONT club? Woodstock itself? other?].

By [date/year], it appears that all ONT clubs had adopted the NY rules.

per Jamieson (1825). A game known in County Fife. Two teams, armed with clubs, try to drive a ball into a hole defended by their opponents. This game may have resembled field hockey more than a safe-haven game.

per Culin. A batting game played with a six-inch, pointed wooden “cat.” The cat is pitched to a batter standing near a four-foot circle. The batter is out if he hits a caught fly or if the ball falls, unhit, into the circle. If put out, the batter goes to the end of the sequence of fielders, and the pitcher becomes the new batter. A batter can accrue points based on the distance from the circle to the where the hit ball lands. A version described by Newell[39] allows the batter to elevate and hit any cat that is pitched outside the circle.

"The Kat is a piece of wood about 6 inches long, 1 1/2 to 2 inches wide at the midpoint and comes to a point at both ends making the form of a double cone. The Kat is placed on the ground in the middle of a big circle and a player uses a "ball stick" to hit one end of it to launch it into the air. As it comes down he tries to hit it out of the circle. If he fails to hit it or doesn't hit it out of the circle he steps off and the next player takes his turn. If he's successful he's assigned a certain number of points depending on how far he hit it."

per Brand and Jamieson. All but one player stands by a hole, holding a stick [called a “cat.”] The last player, holding a ball, gives a signal, and the others run to place their stick in the next adjacent hole before a ball enters it, or he will become the thrower.

Gomme specifies that when before thrower tosses the ball, he gives a sign and all the (boy) players must scramble to a neighbor's hole to obstruct the ball from entering it.

Sources:

Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain: The Origins of Our Vulgar and Provincial Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions., page 408.

J. Jamieson, Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language (Edinburgh, 1825), page 192. Jamiesson describes the gameas being played in County Fife and perhaps elsewhere.

Court records from 1583 [Elizabeth I was in her 25th year as queen] show a dim view of this game. “Whereas there is great abuse in a game or games used in the town called ‘Gidigadie or the Cat’s Pallet . . . ‘ no manner persion shall play at the same games, being above the age of seven years, either in the churchyard or in any streets of the this town, upon pain of . . . being imprisoned in the Doungeon for the space of two hours . . . . Thus, Gidigadie may be another name for Cat’s Pallet. The rules of this game are as yet unknown.

Sources:

John Harland, ed., A Volume of Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester in the Sixteenth Century (Chetham Society, 1884), page 156.

A game for three players. Two defend foot-wide holes set about 26 feet apart with a club, or “dog.” A third player throws a four-inch cat toward the hole, and the defender hits it away. If the cat enters the hole, defender and thrower switch places. Gomme, who uses the name Cat and Dog Hole, describes a game using a ball in which a stone replaces the hole where the batter stands, and adds that if the third player catches a hit ball in the air, that player can try to hit the stone, which sends the batter out.

On US play, 1866: "Cat and Dog -- An interesting trial of skill at this old time game was played at Pittsburgh Pa., on the 5th inst., between the Athletics, of South Pittsburgh, and the Enterprise of Mt. Washington. The game was witnessed by a large crowd of ladies and gentlemen.

[The printed box score shows three players on each side, a pitcher-catcher and two fielders. The result was the Athletics, 180 "measures" and the Enterprise 120 measures. There is no indication of the use of innings, a side-out rule, or fly rule]

A fungo game played in Manhattan in the 1950s. A fungo hitter is replaced by a fielder who catches a ball (or sometimes three balls) on the fly. Played when fewer than six kids were at the ballyard and a team game wasn’t possible.

per “Boys’ Own Book” (1881). A game similar to Nineholes, but without the holes. A ball is thrown up, and a player named. If that player cannot catch it before it bounces twice, he must plug another player or lose a point.

According to Maigaard, Cerkelspelen was “rounders without batting” as played in Flanders. The game evidently had five bases, with fielders near each one, but the infield area was occupied only by the in-team.

In an email of 12/10/2008, Tom Altherr tells of the game of chermany, defined in a 1985 dictionary as “a variety of baseball.” Early usage of the term dates to the 1840s-1860s. Two sources relate the game to baseball, and one, a 1912 book of Virginia folk language, defines it as “a boys’ game with a ball and bats.” We know of but eight references to chermany [churmany, chumny, chuminy] as of October 2009. Its rules of play are sketchy. A Confederate soldier described it as using five or six foot-high sticks as bases and using “crossing out” instead of tagging or plugging runners to retire them.

Sources:

See also Frederic Gomes Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall, Dictionary of American Regional English (Harvard University Press, 1996), page 604.The dictionary notes usage as “esp. VA” and gives four attested citations from 1889 to 1911, one of them a recollection from 1840, and another a 1911 dictionary associating the game with “the Southern United States.”

According to Morrison (1908) this game is “practically identical with the game of “Rounders.” He goes on to describe a game with three bases set 50 yards apart, with plugging and crossing as ways to retire batters. Games are played to 50 or 100 counts. The game is depicted as “practically dead” in Uist (In the Outer Hebrides off Scotland) but formerly was very popular.

Coed softball is basically just softball using female as well as male players.

It is, however, evolving a bit independently. Local coed leagues have formed for after-work play in US cities. It seems to have become necessary to add some rules to ensure that women are not put at a disadvantage (and so continue to participate) among all those males with more ballplaying experience and more upper-body strength.

Examples include use of a smaller ball, requiring outfields to play deep enough to allow balls to drop in the outfield, requiring alternating genders in the batting order, etc.

[The game we played] "had only one batsman at a time, running to a point about 10 yards off to the right and back again after each hit . . . we called it Continuous Cricket. The blurring of the concepts of "bowled" and "run out" makes the game a bunch of fun to play."

This game, encountered in Upper Egypt in the 1850s, is briefly described: it is “played likewise with a ball; one tosses it, and another strikes it with his hand, and runs to certain limits, if he can, without being hit by a ‘fag’ who picks up the ball and throws in.”

Evidently primarily a St. Louis pastime, Corkball is presumably derived from baseball, involving down-sized bats and balls. The ball is pitched overhand from a distance of 55 feet. There is no running, but imaginary runners advance on hits by succeeding batters. Hit balls are defined as singles, and sometimes as longer hits, depending on where they land. Caught flies are outs. The game is said to have originated over a century ago among brewery workers using broomsticks and the bungs [corks] used to seal beer barrels. Team sizes vary from two to five players. Annual tournaments have been held at least through 2012. Dedicated corkball fields are reportedly found in St. Louis.

When played with tennis balls, the game is sometimes called Fuzz-Ball.

Some additional 2013 data from Corkball fan Jeff Kopp in St. Louis:

[] The game was reportedly first played in about 1890.

[] There are four active clubs in St.L, and pickup games appear on many Sundays at the Don Young Corkball Fields at Jefferson Barracks Park.

[] Special balls and bats are supplied by the Markwort Sporting Goods Company.

[] Isolated reports of corkball play are found in other US locations. Drummer Butch Trucks, a nephew of Tiger pitcher Virgil Trucks and founding member of the Allman Brothers Band, reportedly played corkball in Jacksonville FL and taught his band-mates the game. Another account places the game in an area from St. Louis "only" north to Springfield IL. A Chicago Corkball Club was reportedly active around 2010.

[] Another form of the game, played with bottle caps in place of balls/corks, is called Bottle Caps.

Sources:

Special thanks to Jeff Kittel, emails of 10/11/09 and 9/22/13, for material on this game. A website on corkball is found at http://www.playcorkball.com, as accessed 9/25/13. It includes a 2012 paper on the history and context of the game. Its author, Jeff Kopp, sent us many further details (outlined above) in a 10/16/2013 email.

A plugging game that is closer to dodge ball than to safe-haven games. Some players, standing at designated corners or the perimeter of the playing area, pass the ball teammate to teammate in order to make it easier for one of them to plug anyone among group of players swarming around inside the field. If plugged, a player is out of the game.

A reference to “crekettes” in a 1533 poem has been construed as evidence that the game of cricket originated in a pastime brought to England by Flemish weavers , who arrived in the 14th Century. A German scholar thinks that this earlier game originated in the Franco-Flemish border area as early as 1150. We have no faint notion of how this earlier game might have been played.

per Gomme. Two holes are made about ten feet apart. A player on the out-team pitches a cat toward a hole, and its defender tries to hit it with his stick. He and his in-team mate then run between the holes. When more than four boys play the extra out-team players field as in cricket.

Gregory Christiano describes this as a non-running game in which a player threw a spaldeen against a curb so that it lofted into the field of play. A caught fly was and out, and otherwise the number of bounces determined base advancement, wilth four bounces counting as a home run.

This game resembles other northern European safe-haven games like lapta. Batters bat, then run to a single distant base, trying to return as later batters have their turns.

Some unique aspects of this game are that only one (good) pitch is allowed, and the batter runs whether the ball is hit or not; multiple runners can occupy the single base if they don't think they can reach home safely; once a runner leaves the runing base, he/she cannot return; fielders cannot run with the ball; a three-out-side-out rule obtains, except for the case of a caught fly, which immediately retires the in team; runners are out if tagged, or plugged below the knee.

This game is apparently played today in Canada and Australia. The paper does not discuss the origins or history of the game.

A game played from 1916 to 1926, when it transformed into Softball. Diamond ball was also known as women's baseball. Particularly popular in Sarasota FL, this game was played in the 1920s on sandy beaches (sometimes at night under lights) , and uses a 14-inch ball like used in indoor baseball. Games were played in less than an hour, affording lunch-hour play.

Sources:

Paul Dickson, The Worth Book of Softball (Facts on File, 1994), pages 57 and 58.

A base-running game without balls or bats, this game was evidently invented by Russ Lopez in Nevada as a blend of baseball and frisbee. Two teams of six are suggested. It is to be played on a field that resembles a baseball diamond. A "flinger" tosses the disc into fair territory, and if uncaught by the fielding team, he/she advances base to base.

As of September 2013, this game had been invented, but not yet played.

Dodgeball is a basic youth game with no batting or safe-haven bases. Two teams form. A player can be put out by being hit with a throw rubber ball, unless he catches it, in which case the thrower is out. The game ends when the last player on a team is put out.

In its 1934 manifestation, donkey baseball let the donkeys run, and the players ride. "[A]ll participantgs, excepting the catcher, pitcher and teh batsman are astride donkeys. After hitting the ball it is necessary for the hitter to get on the back of a donkey and make his way to first base before the fielders, also on donkeys, retrieve the ball."

The earliest version of donkey base ball was named for "donkey races," which Peter Morris sees as "a silly type of contest." The team that scored the fewest runs was the winner. Maybe you had to be there to agree with the Brooklyn Eagle that the game was "very amusing , and perhaps the most novel match ever played."

According to an 1860 text, players sit on stools placed in a circle, and one player tosses or strikes a ball into the air. If he retrieves the ball and hits another player before that player reaches the next stool, the two players switch roles.

[1] Drive ball: An 1835 book published in New Haven describes drive ball. David Block's summary: "In this activity, two boys with bats face each other, taking turns fungoing the ball. When one boy hits the ball, the other has to retrieve it as quickly as he can, then fungo it back from the spot he picked it up."

[2] Drive: A ball game, listed along with the Old Cat games and Baseball, mentioned in the memoirs of a New Hampshire man born in 1831. The rules of this game are not given. It may not have been a baserunning game.

Sources:

[1] The Boy's Book of Sports; a Description of the Exercises and Pastimes of Youth (New Haven, S. Babcock), 24 pages. Summarized in David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), page 198. An 1849 chapbook from Babcock also mentions drive ball as the last mentioned of six common games played with a ball, naming "base-ball, trap ball, cricket, up-ball, catch-ball and drive ball." See Juvenile Pastimes; or Girls' and Boys' Book of Sports (New Haven, S. Babcock), 16 pages, per David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 212.

This game, called “long out of date” in an 1867 newspaper article, seemed to resemble Long Ball but with three bases. A “tosser” lofted the ball and a nearby batter hit it, then ran to a base [a “bye”] a few feet away, then to a second base 25-30 feet distant, then home. Completing this circuit before the ball was returned by fielders to the tosser gave the striker another turn at bat. The account does not say whether this was a team game, whether it employed plugging, or whether runners could elect to stay on base. It seems possible that the adjective "dutch" indicated that the game came from Holland or Germany.

Sources:

Daily Cleveland Herald, April 24, 1867, as posted to the 19CBB listserve by Kyle DeCicco-Carey on 8/19/2008.

A version of this game described in 1860 has players place their hats near a wall. One of them tosses a ball from 15 feet away, and if the ball lands in a player’s hat, he tries to quickly plug a fleeing compatriot or else he receives an “egg” [a small stone] in his hat. Three stones and you’re out of the game.

Sources:

Daily Cleveland Herald, April 24, 1867, as posted to the 19CBB listserve by Kyle DeCicco-Carey on 8/19/2008. p. 42

per “The Boy’s Own Book.” A non-team form of rounders using three bases in which a player who is put out then takes on the role of feeder [pitcher]. An 1859 handbook describes feeder as a game with four or five stones or marks for bases. Plugging is permitted.

Fielders catch fungo hits, with a caught fly worth 100 points, a one-bouncer 75 points, etc. A player who accrues 500 points becomes the hitter. In some versions, muffed catches deduct points, and the Hit-the-Bat option for returned throws is employed. Land’s review of schoolyard games includes two references to 500. It is also evidently called Twenty-One in some localities.

Writing in volume 5, no. 4 (April 2012) of Originals, Tom Altherr notes that a 1900 source on schoolyard games noted "The game of Flip Up or Sky-Ball is still played by smaller children, and sometimes by large ones (especially girls). It is often played by as many as a dozen players and is here as "Tip-Up," or "Tippy-Up." The 1900 source is D. C. Gibson, "Play Ball," Mind and Body: A Monthly Journal,Volume 7, no 73 (March 1900), page 7. No rules for this game are given, but Sky-ball is elsewhere descrived as a fungo game.

Gregory Christiano recalls this as a fungo game for times where there were too few players for stick-ball in New York. A fielder who caught the ball on the fly went “up” to bat. Land quotes New York City resident Michael Frank: “Hardball? Never. Other baseball-related games we played included Stickball in the street and “Flies-Up” in the playground. The latter game is not further described, but could be a species of Fungo.

"Plugging as in soaking the hitter - never read about that in Cricket except for 'French Cricket' (a picnic game played by kids in France & I played it too) where you stand with your feet together as if standing in attention, with the bat in front protecting it below the knees and surrounded by fielders/catchers surrounding you. The object is to hit the batter below the knee with the ball from any direction & the batter hits it away. If he looses his balance & one leg is lifted up or he gets hit on the leg, he is out. Fielders are about 10' away & the ball is thrown quickly at the legs."

Query: It would be interesting to know what the French name for this game is, and whether it relates to earlier folk games in France.

Protoball's Glossary of Games includes many nonrunning games in which the ball (or cat, jor other object) is put in play by a batter who gently lofts a ball and bats, or "fungoes," it to other players. Some better-known examples are Pepper, Brannboll (Sweden), Catch-a-Fly (Manhattan), Corkball (St. Louis), 500, Half-ball, Indian Ball (MO), Sky Ball (CT), and Tip-Cat.

Some early references:

Culin (1891): A batter fungoes balls to a set of fielders. A fielder who first catches a set number of balls on the fly becomes the batter.

Chadwick (1884) describes Fungo as requiring the hitter to deliver the ball on the fly to the fielders, or he loses his place. This practice probably has had numerous local variant names such as Knock Up and Catch and Knocking Flies.

It is common for those coaching baseball to give outfielders practice in judging and fielding fly balls by hitting balls toward them fungo-style.

Fuzz-Ball evidently takes many local variant forms, but all employ a tennis ball (often with its surface fuzz burned off and a slim bat. The number of strikes per out and outs per inning, among other parameters, vary from place to place. It is placed in the "fungo" category here, but in some areas real baserunning is seen, making it close to baseball. Teams are often small.

per Perrin (1902). This game involves pitching a ball to a batter who hits it into a field where an opposing team’s fielders are. He tries to reach a goal line at the end of the playing area [80 feet away] and to return to the batting zone without being plugged by the ball. There is no mention of the possibility of remaining safely at the goal area. Three outs constitute a half-inning, and a team that scores 25 “points” [runs] wins the contest. The game resembles the family of "battingball" games reported by Maigaard.

This game, described as an amalgam of Baseball and traditional German Schlagball, was introduced in 1986 by Roland Naul in the context of a revival of Turner games for German youth. In the mid-1990s, a one-handed wooden bat was developed especially for the game. As of October 2009, we are uncertain how the two sets of rules were blended to make this new game. The author mentions that the fielding team can score points as well as the batting team.

From 2012 searches, it is not clear that this game is still played.

Sources:

Roland Naul, “Applied Sport History,” Proceedings of the Sixth Congress of the International Society for the History of Physical Education and Sport (Plantin-Print, Budapest, 2002), pages 432ff.

A 1921 handbook and a 1922 handbook depicts German Bat Ball as a team game that uses a ball like a volleyball and that has neither a bat nor pitching. A “batter” puts the ball in play by serving or “posting” it [as in schoolyard punchball] and then running around a post (Clark) or to a distant safe-haven area (Elmore/O’Shea). A run is scored if the runner can return to the batting base without being plugged. It is unclear whether the runner can opt to stay at the distant base to avoid being put out. A caught fly is an out, and a three-out-side-out rule applies.

Court records from 1583 [Elizabeth I was in her 25th year as queen] show a dim view of this game. “Whereas there is great abuse in a game or games used in the town called ‘Gidigadie or the Cat’s Pallet . . . ‘ no manner persion shall play at the same games, being above the age of seven years, either in the churchyard or in any streets of the this town, upon pain of . . . being imprisoned in the Doungeon for the space of two hours . . . . Thus, Gidigadie may be another name for Cat’s Pallet.

Sources:

John Harland, ed., A Volume of Court Leet Records of the Manor of Manchester in the Sixteenth Century (Chetham Society, 1884), page 156.

In Baseball Before We Knew It, [page 207] David Block describes a game in a German manual that “is identical to the early French game of la balle empoisonee,” and that an illustration of two boys playing it “shows it to be a bat-and-ball game." Giftball in German translates literally as "poison ball."

Another name for early base ball, perhaps confined to certain areas. Usage of the name is known in New England. As of June 2012, the Protoball Chronology lists 10 references to the game of Goal Ball or Goal, or games in which bases are term "goals." All refer to play in the six New England states, and all but two are found before 1850.

Sources:

The best known references to Goal Ball are Robin Carver,The Book of Sports (Boston, Lilly Wait Colman and Holden, 1834), pp 37-40, -- see Protoball entry 1834.1 -- and Boy’s and Girl’s Book of Sports (Providence, Cory and Daniels), pp 17-19 -- see Protoball Chronology entry 1835.6.

per Wieand. This is a game with pitching and batting but no running. A caught fly ball results in an out, and the batter then goes to the outfield, or grutz, to begin his rotation back to the batting position. If a ball is not caught, the fielder tries to return it to home through an arch made by the batter.

An apparent non-running relative of tip-cat. A batter hits a gulli (a six-inch cat) with a danda, and is out if a fielder catches it. If it falls to the ground, a fielder throws it back, trying to hit the danda, which is laid on the ground. It is not clear if this is a team game, or if the gulli is pitched on simply fungoed. There is no running. The geographical range of its play is unclear.

Thomason (1975) recalls Half-Rubber as a 1930s school recess game involving a sponge-rubber ball sliced cleanly in half and a sawed-off broomstick as a bat. Thrown side-arm, the ball had good movement, and was difficult to field. There was no running, but outs and innings were recorded and (virtual) base advancement depending on the lengths that the ball was batted. A 1997 newspaper article recalls a similar game recalled as Half-Ball being played in the Philadelphia area.

This game emerged in a bout 1910 in the SC/GA area of the south, and retained strong popularity into the 1970s.

per McLean. McLean notes that hand-in and hand-out was among the games banned by King Edward IV in 1477. She identifies it as “probably a kind of trick catch.” The 1477 ban spelled the game name as “handyn and handout.”

Sources:

Teresa McLean, The English at Play in the Middle Ages(Kensal Press, 1985), page 80. In The Royal Dictionary by A. Boyer (London, 1764), Hand In Hand Out is defined as "the Name of an unlawful Game," and translated into French as "forte de jeu defendu."

A form of Roly Poly (or Roley Poley or Roll Ball) that substitutes hats for holes in the ground. Newell says this game was played among the Pennsylvania Dutch.Brewster says that Hat Ball variants are known in many countries, and include Petjeball [Dutch] and Kappenspiel [German].

Hildegarde is described in an 1881 publication as a new English game that was "a combination of the noble old English one of Cricket with the popular American one of Base-ball. It is especially adapted in its arrangements and implements to fit it for the use of ladies."

The game was played with 15-inch paddles and 2.5-inch rubber balls. Three poles, several yards apart, are both the bases and targets that can put batters and runners out. Teams of from two (maybe four?) to fifteen are accommodated, and a "scrub" (non-team) form is an option when very few players are available. A pitcher throws pitches with one foot placed on a foot-base located amid the three bases and at a distance of ten feet.

Some interesting variations from cricket and base ball:

[1] The batter ("striker") can adjust the height of the (roughly one-foot by two-feet) "strike zone" to her/his taste. This recalls the early base ball practice of allowing the batter to request high or low pitches.

[2] Batters can employ bats in each hand if desired.

[3] The number of outs per inning depends on team size, with eleven-player side, for instance, six outs retires a side.

[4] After completing a single circuit of the bases, a batter completes the at-bat, unlike in cricket, so the entire batting order is continually active, unlike in cricket.

[5] We have the impression that running is compulsory when a ball is batted.

The pamphlet also describes a second game, Ladies' Cricket, that can be played with the same equipment, but employing 2 bases and using more cricket-like rules.

Explaining the niche for Hildegarde, the game instructions (page 4) explain that "The best possible game hitherto has been the old game of Ball, called in some places Tut-Ball; but in this there is no scope for the exhibition of an individual skill, and no object is to be gained worth the winning."

Describing the ball, the point is made (page 7) pilosophizes that "There is no good out-door game without a Ball in it . . . "

As of 2/4/2014, we know of only one report of actual play, a game in the Washington Heights section of New York reflected (as a football/cricket hybrid, a "big soft ball, being struck with a wide bat as well as kicked), which appeared in the Sunday Boston Herald on 9/23/1883. No reports of play in Britain are yet known.

A fungo game in which a ball is hit to a group of fielders. If one of them can roll the ball back and hit the bat so that the ball hits the ground before the batter can catch the ricochet, the two exchange places.

per Culin. A team game resembling Kick the Ball, but using a simple catapult to put into play a 3-inch stick instead of a ball. Fly outs retire the batsman. The bases are the four street-corners at an intersection.

H. J Philpott used the names "hole-ball and "wibble-wobble" as games that seem consistent with hat-ball. One player would place the ball in a hole or hat, and the other players would scatter before being hit with the ball by the player designated as "it." This game thus shares evasive running and plugging with base ball.

Our single reference to this game comes from an 1847 Alabama newspaper in its attempt to describe curling to southern readers: “Did you ever play ‘bass ball,’ or ‘goal,’ or ‘hook-em-snivy,’ on the ice?” Its nature is unknown. “Hookum-snivy” is slang for adultery, not that it matters.

Sources:

The Alabama Reporter, as reprinted in Spirit of the Times(January 16, 1847), page 559.Provided by David Block, 2/28/2008.

Only known from Francis Willughby’s 17th century Book of Games, hornebillets is played with a cat (fashioned from animal horn), which is thrown toward holes defended by players with dog-sticks. When they hit the cat, batters run to the next hole, placing the stick in the hole before the cat can be retrieved and be put into the hole. The number of holes depends on the number of players on each team.

per Jamieson (1825.) Two teams of two boys, defend their holes with a sticks, described as like a walking sticks, against a cat (“a piece of stick, and frequently a sheep’s horn”) thrown “at some distance” by their opposite numbers.

Confected in 2009 at an unidentified school in Howland, Ohio, this game (“usually played from May to September”) melds baseball and rounders. Teams of six players populate an area with an infield in the form of an isosceles triangle [two sides are 83 feet long, and the base is 62 feet long, with home set at the angle at the right side of the base, and foul lines extending from home through the two running posts]. The counterparts to balls and strikes are influenced by whether a pitch lands in a net to the rear of the home square. Apparently, a batter cannot stay at a base, but must try to complete a round before the fielders can return the ball to the net. A local league is reported to play the game.

Per Brewster, 1953: A down-sized, non-running baseball variant. Two teams of five players form. A regular softball is pitched underhand to the batter. Outs are recorded for caught fly balls and ground balls cleanly fielded inside the baselines. Unlimited swings are permitted. Three-out-side-out innings and five-inning games are prescribed. The playing field is represented in a figure showing a fair ground of less than 45 degrees.

See also the text of "Teach Your Kids to Play Indian Ball!," below. The variant of the non-running game Indian Ball described in this 2013 article entails pitching by a member of the batting team, strikes called on all balls that are not hit fair (including pitches not swung at), outs on short fair hits, home runs for suitably long fair hits, employment of a baseball or tennis ball, and ghost runners. The author, at playcorkball.com, stresses that players can play this game without adult supervision.

Evolving from an 1887 innovation in Chicago involving a broomstick as a bat and a boxing glove as the ball, indoor baseball is described in a 1929 survey as particularly popular in gymnasiums in the US mid-west in the early 20th century. The game of softball traces back to indoor play.

Origins -- On Thanksgiving Day at te Farragut Club in Chicgo in 1887, a participant recalled, "[T]he fellows were throwing an ordinary boxing glove around the room, which was struck at by one of the boys with a broom. George W. Hancock suddenly called out, 'Bpys, let's play baseball!'" Hancock was later known as the Father of Indoor Baseball.

Sources:

See Paul Dickson, The Worth Book of Softball (Facts on File, 1994), Chapter 3 (pages 46-59). Also, John Allen Krout, Annals of American Sport(Yale University Press, 1929), page 219.

The above quotation is found in Peter Morris, A Game of Inches (Ivan Dee, 2010 single-bvolume edition, page 498.

A communication received from Peadar O Tuatain describes what is known of the ancient game of Irish Rounders. Details of the old game are apparently lost to history, but some rules encoded in 1932 were used for a revival in 1956, and the revival version, which resembles baseball much more than it does English rounders, is still being played. It employs a hurling ball and a game comprises five three-out innings. The game is played without gloves and, perhaps unique among safe-haven games, batted balls caught in the air are not outs.

Lowth (1855) describes Jellal, encountered among the people of Upper Eqypt, as resembling “in some of its parts our old game of Rounders” as he knew it in England. There was hitting and “getting home,” but a difference that he noted was that one boy hit the ball and another ran.

per Brewster. A team form of Hat Ball. A player throws a ball to the other group, and runs toward it. If the receiving group can plug the thrower, he is captured, and the game continues until one side is depleted.

"As a rule, boys played rougher games. One of them was the competitiveKichke-pale or Chizshkes, as it was known in the Polesie region. Kichke-pale was an East European Jewish version of cricket or baseball, and was similar to the English game called Peggy. The kichke was a small peg pointed at both ends, while the pale was the longer stick. The kichke was placed on an elevated spot, near a hole in the ground. The player would hit the pointed end of the peg with the larger stick that would send the peg flying into the air. He would then run and again try to hit the peg while it was airborne, to send it farther away from the plate. The more times one hit the peg, the more skilled the player. The other player would run to get the peg and throw it to the plate. The peg was not to be struck on its return to the plate. But if it were not successfully returned, the first player would then strike the peg wherever it happened to fall. This would continue until the second player got the peg back to the plate, after which he became the striker and the other player, the catcher. The game would go on until the second player scored a given number of hits of the peg, usually twenty or thirty. The loser would then have to give the winner what was called a yarsh, which meant that the winner would have the right to strike the peg even when it was being returned to the plate. The yarsh would end when the peg fell on the plate."

per Culin (1891). A team game generally resembling Kickball, but using a small rubber ball. There is no plugging; runners are out if they are between bases when the fielding team returns the kicked ball to a teammate near home. No mention is made of fly outs. There is a three-out-side-out rule, and a game usually comprises four innings. Johnson (1910) lists Kick the Ball as a Baseball game.

per Culin. The wicket is a piece of wood or a short section of a hose. Players kick the wicket, and then run among [usually four] bases. An “it” player tries to catch the ball, or to retrieve and reposition it while baserunners are between bases. The game is not described as a team game.

A traditional school recess game in the U.S., Kickball has lately grown in popularity as a co-ed adult game. Kickball strongly resembles Baseball, but the large rubber ball is put in play by bowled delivery and struck by a kicker-runner, who then runs from base to base. Plugging below the neck retires a runner who not at a base. The rules of the World Adult Kickball Association, with 25,000 registered members, specifies 11 players per team, 60-foot basepaths, and a strike zone about 30 inches wide and one foot high.

per MacLagan. A player stands at the center of 11 stations marked with a stone, and a player at each. At the central player’s signal, the other 11 must change positions, and he tries to strike one with the ball before they can complete their move. Each position can be occupied by but one player.

Brand describes Kit-Cat as a game for two teams of three players each. Each player on the in-team stands near a hole with a two-foot stick. One is thrown a cat. If he hits it (and if it is not caught in the air for an out), the in-team runs from hole to hole, placing their sticks in each hole and counting the number passed. Outs can also be made by throwing a cat into an unoccupied hole, or by strikeout. The number of outs per half-inning, and the number of missed swings that constitute an out, are agreed in advance.

Sources:

Brand, Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain: The Origins of Our Vulgar and Provincial Customs, Ceremonies and Superstitions (London: George Bell and Sons, 1900), pages 423-424.

An off-shoot of Indoor Baseball played early in the 20th Century. In 1920, 64 men's teams and 25 women's teams played regularly in the Twin Cities. Authorites changed the name of the game to diamond ball in 1922. In the 1930s, the game merged with sofball.

Sources:

See Paul Dickson, The Worth Book of Softball (Facts on File, 1994), page 52-53.

Satisfactory evidence has yet to be collected, but it appears that a Polish game, quadrant, is a lively base-running game.

We have come across three YouTube videos on the game, none in English. The field resembles a three-base baseball diamond. Batters are seem to put the ball into play with a one-handed club, usually with an uprightstroke resembling an overhand tennis serve. The ball must, apparently, travel in the air past a line between first and third base. Caught flies are outs. The batter-runner advances as far as possible, but some rule limits that advance -- perhaps when the fielding team throws the fielded ball past a the batter's line. Players depicted are children and school-age youths or both genders. Plugging is not depicted.

One 1895 source, identifies this game as Tip-cat. He writes that Tip-cat “is doubtless a very old diversion for children. It is illustrated as “La Batonet” in the charming series of children’s games designed by Stella and published in Paris, 1657, as “Les Jeux et Plaisiris [sic] de l’Enfance.”

Maigaard (1941) notes they while most forms of rounders and longball were now lost, three - baseball, cricket, and bo-ball - remain vigorous. Bo-Ball is played in Finland. The only known source on this game, called Lahden Mailaveikot in Finnish, is a Finnish-language website, on that shows photographs of a vigorous game with aluminum bats, gloves, helmets, and much sliding and running but no other helpful hints for English-speakers. Similarities to Pesapallo are apparent.

HELP? Can you help us get a fix on the nature of contemporary Lahden Mailaveikot?

Varying accounts of this game are found. It is claimed that evidence places a form of the game to the time of Peter the Great, and that bats and leather balls date back to the 1300s. One 1989 news article reports that it is now strictly a children’s game. Still, some Russians say that “baseball is the younger brother of baseball.” In contemporary play, the fielding team’s “server” stands next to a batter and gently tosses a ball up to be hit. After the hit, runners try to run to a distant line [one 1952 account calls this the “city”] and back without being plugged. Caught fly balls are worth a point, but a successful run is two points. A time clock governs a game’s length.

A 1952 article does not mention a pitcher or points awarded for catches (but not runs?), but notes use of a round stick to hit with and also confirms sthe use of plugging. Neither account says that runners can stay safely at the "city" if they don't venture to run back home.

Sources:

New York Times, September 16, 1952, as cited in Paul Dickson, The Dickson Dictionary (Third Edition, Norton, 2009), page 485.

Bill Keller, "In Baseball, the Russians Steal All the Bases," New York Times, July 20 1987.

Ira Berkow, "Russian Eye on Baseball," New York Times, August 14 1989.

Carl Schreck, "No Wrong Way to Swing Bat," The St. Petersburg Times, October 31 2003.

Leik mjul ("play ball") was a game played on the island of Runo (now called "Ruhnu" and part of Estonia). Little is known about it, but some suggest that it was like rounders.

Edwin Mehl wrote in 1949 that this game evolved from a game taught to locals by the crew of a British ship stranded on the island in 1846. There are indications that it was still played in 1920. Historically occupied by Swedes, the island was transferred to Estonia after World War II.

Isak Lidstrom, a graduate student at Malmo University in Sweden, reports in March 2016 that he is conducting research on the game.

-------

Isak's research report, on April 8, 2016:

Hello!

"After a comparison between the rules of rounders in David Block's appendix (The boy's own book 1828 and The every boy's book 1841) and leik mjul om Runö, the games seems very similar. In the Runö game, the pitcher and the batter should stand in a circle, and if the batter is successful, he can run to the first base, the second base, third base in order to reach the circle again. I tried to make a primitive sketch based on the instructions written in Klein´s book: {this sketch does not transfer successfully yet; it displays a field diagram indicating counterclockwise running, a distance of 7 meters from home to first and third to home, and 35 meters from first to second and second to third. The pitcher stands about 7 to 10 meters from the batsman.}

A Pitcher

B Batter

C First base/stick (fårst stakan)

D Second base/stick (an stakan)

E Third base/stick (trejje stakan)

---

"This procedure from the 1841 rules, "In most places it is usual when all the players but one have been caught or struck out, for him to take the “rounder” — i.e., strike the ball so far that he can run round to all the bases and then home before the opposite party can get the ball, and “ground” it, or throw it down on the “home” has its counterpart in the Runö game when the last man cries "Nu slår jag runders" (Now I bat runders).

[Isak's remaining questions] -- "I have one question about Mehl's article "Baseball in the stone age". Two times in the article (p. 152, 157) Mehl mentions ball games on Runö, referring to Per Maigaard. In the foot notes, though, Mehl doesn't cite any written work by Maigaard. In the two articles I have found ("Slagboldspillenes historie", and the article that is published as an appendix in David's book) Maigaard never mentions the Runö ball games. Do you know if there is any other text or books where Maigaards deals with ball games? Or is it perhaps the case that Mehl cites Maigaard through oral communication?

"I find this detective work very exiting and hopefully the work will result in an article published in some history or folklore journal in Sweden, after working out the name of the ship that took rounders to Runö. Do you think that there might be an international interest in the case, so that it would be worth to write an article in english? I saw for example that there is a journal named NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture.

Kind regards,

Isak

PS -- This in most places is usual when all the players but one have been caught

or struck out, for him to take the “rounder” — i.e:

strike the ball so far that he can run round to all the bases and then home before the opposite party can

get the ball, and “ground” it, or throw it down on the “home.or struck out, for him to take the “rounder” — i.e.:

., strike the ball so far that he can run round to all the bases and then home before the opposite party can

Apparently a form of Stickball played in Chicago area streets as early as the 1940s that uses 16-inch circumference softballs (the standard softball is about 12 inches), a slow-pitch delivery, small teams, and an unspecified bat. The type of hit achieved depended on where the ball fell among lines marked on the street (implying that baserunning was not part of this game.

Maigaard sees Long Ball as the oldest ancestor of rounders, cricket and baseball, a game that was played in many countries. Long Ball is described as using teams of from 4 to 20 players. It involved a pitcher, batter, and an “out-goal” or base that the batter-runner tried to reach after hitting (or after missing a third swing) and without being plugged. Caught flies signaled an immediate switch between the in-team and the out-team. Many members of the in-team could share a base as runners. Runs were not counted, as the objective was to remain at bat for a long period. A 1914 US text describes Long Ball in generally similar terms, but one that uses a regular "indoor baseball." There is a single base to run to, scoring by runs, a three-out-side-out rule, and no foul ground. Plugging is allowed.

A weblog written in the Australian outback in 2007 described a version of contemporary Long Ball. Modern variants of Long Ball are still played on a club or school basis, including Danish Longball in Denmark and England, Schlagball in Germany and Silesia and Palant in Poland.

Only two sources mentions this game. Cassidy implies that there were only two bases, and that if a runner only got to the far base, that runner would need to return home as the pitcher and catcher played catch. The era of play is uncertain.

A 2004 website for a teen camp program also soptslights its "long-dutch baseball" tradition for both boys and girls. The camp is located at Onaway Island in Wisconsin.

Curtis (1914) mentions Long Town as an alternative name for Long Ball. We have several references to Long Town Ball, most in the South and mid-West states, none north of a line between New York and Chicago. Most describe no rules of the game. One account in Lehigh County PA (about 50 miles NE of Philadelphia) recalls the game as played in the 1850s as having two bases about 25 paces apart, plugging, a fly rule, and as allowing multiple runners on the (non-batting) base.

This is the game played according to rules that were codified in May 1858 in Dedham Massachusetts. It featured short basepaths, an absence of foul ground, plugging of runners, a smaller and softer and lighter ball, wooden stakes in place of sascks as bases,winners definied as the first team to reach 100 “tallies,” and a one-out-side-out rule. It remains unclear how close these rules -- written 13 years after the Knickerbocker rules were codified -- were to round ball, goal ball, and/or base games played in MA for the previous 50-75 years.

The Massachusetts Game declined fairly rapidly after 1860.

Sources:

The Mass game rules appeared in Mayhew and Baker, Base Ball.A Manual of Cricket and Base Ball, With Rules and Regulations Illustrated. (Boston, Mayhew and Baker, 1858), pages20 - 24.

This invented game, an invented form of Kick Ball, is an indoor game reportedly played in many US schools. It uses large mats instead of bases, and multiple runners can safely occupy a base. The standard format uses an all-out-side-out rule to define a half-inning, can involve large teams, can have areas (e.g., a scoreboard or a basketball hoop) for designated home runs, a fly rule, tagging, and scoring only when a runner passes home and successfully returns to first base. Some schools use the infield format of Massachusetts base ball - the striker hits from between the first and fourth base. Foul territory varies, but forward hits are required.

Incompletely verified accounts suggest that Meta, sometimes called Longa Meta, is a traditional Hungarian folk game that involves base-running.

As of Fall 2015, we are actively seeking further information about this game and how it was played.

A few scattered accounts in English describe the game (see our reading notes in the Supplemental Text below). Hungarian sources are largely unexamined as yet.

Some impressions that emerge at this stage:

[] Generally, the game resembled English rounders, German schlagball, and early forms of base ball in the US: scoring was done by running to one or more distant bases and returning safely to the batting area; some form of bat was used to put the ball in play after it had been served to the batter, and then hit away; runners could be put out if they were caught off base;

[] The playing field was a rectangular area (defining fair ground for hits, apparently) whose dimensions could vary with the number of players;

[] The batting team and the fielding team exchanged sides after their side was put out, or at the end of an allotted time period.

[] The game is thought to have subsided in the 20th Century, but attempts to re-create it have been noted in the past few years. There are undocumented assertions that the game dates back to the 1500s.

"Longa Meta" is said to be a Latin phrase, not a Hungarian term.

History: Writing in 1988 about Budapest in 1900, John Lukacs wrote, "there was nothing in the way of organized athletics or sports in the schools. An old Hungarian game of longa meta (the name came from Latin), a game similar to stickball or even baseball, was still played by children in empty lots of the city. By 1900 it was replaced by soccer."

Sources:

Our 6 most substantial leads are these:

[1] Gyula Hajdu, Magyar Nepi Jatekok Gyuj Temenye (Collection of Hungarian Folk Games), (Budapest, 1971), pages 149-152. A compilation of baserunning games (and their names) in about 60 locations within current Hungarian borders, with brief notes on some variations see. Untranslated by Protoball as of September 2015. (Supplied by Hannah Foster, Budapest, email of August 13, 2015. She also reports on meta as described in Lajos Porsoit's writing.

Described in 1977 as a children’s game played at PS 172 in New York City, Mickey resembles traditional Barn Ball. A pitcher bounces a spaldeen ball off a wall and a batter tries to hit it on the rebound. Rules for baserunning and scoring are not given.

per Games and Sports. Each player is assigned the name of a day of the week. A player throws a ball against a wall, calling out a day. The player assigned that day must catch the ball, or if missing it must throw as one of his fleeing compatriots, losing a point if he misses.

Sources:

Games and Sports for Young Boys,(Routledge, Warne, and Routledge, London, 1859)., page 33.

Also described in Alice Bertha Gomme, The Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London, D. Nutt, 1894), page unspecified.

per Brewster. Baseball for small groups. This game is very similar to Scrub, Work-up and Rounds, but sets the usual number of players at 12, and specifies a rotation of 1B-P-C-batter instead of 1B-C-P-batter. A variant name is Move-up Piggy.

per Gomme. A boy throws a small stick to another boy standing near a hole, who tries to hit it with a three-foot stick, and then to run to a prescribed mark and back without being touched by the smaller stick, and without that stick being thrown into or very near the hole. Any even number of boys can play this game.

per Brewster. A Czech variant of Call Ball is called Nations. Each player is assigned a country name, a ball is placed in a hole, and a country name is called out. The player with that name retrieves the ball as all others start running away. The ball-holder can then call “stop,” and the others must freeze in position while he attempts to plug one of them.

Sometimes described as a board game or a form of quoits, Nine Holes is elsewhere (1853-1868) depicted as a running game -- in which players had to run among holes without being plugged by a ball -- that resembles Hat-ball and Egg-Hat.

A game described as the same as Trap Ball. Also names as Nor and Spel, Knur and Spell, and Nur and Spel. Gomme notes that a wooden ball was sometimes used. The objective was mainly to hit the ball for distance.

This game is mentioned, along with Swede Ball in a 1908 book on North Dakota folkways. Said to be taught to local children by Swedish newcomers and a Swedish teacher, the game is only depicted as being “played somewhat like ‘one old cat.’” It seems conceivable that this game is Brannboll. Maigaard (1941) notes a Norwegian form of Long Ball, noted as “probably recent,” that uniquely uses a field that resembles baseball’s use of a 90-degree fair territory delimitation.

Novaball was played as All-Star competition by the Arlington softball program in 2001 and 2002. Each inning, one team selected a special rule for that inning; examples are clockwise baserunning, the use of 6 bases in place of 4, force outs implemented by throwing the ball into a 5-gallon paint bucket, etc.

A variety of games could be played by throwing a ball against a pointed surface such as a curb or step. A ball that missed the point would become a ground ball. A ball that hit the point could be a pop-up, line drive, etc. Some type of infield boundary was established. A ball that bounced inside the boundary is out, one that cleared the boundary and bounced is a hit, and each bounce added another base. Four bounces was a home run. If the ball was caught before it bounces, it was an out.

Curb ball is the most difficult variation because the curb is low and there is no backstop. Also, there is no obvious infield boundary.

An easier alternative is stoop ball because the step is slightly higher, there is usually some type of backstop, and the edge of the sidewalk is a convenient infield boundary.

Many New York apartment buildings incorporate a wonderful architectural detail: a concrete molding that trims the building at the base and is typically about 18 inches high. This provides a perfect point and backstop. The rules are the same as for stoop ball.

I was raised in off-the-point heaven, a building that was clearly designed with the game in mind because in addition to the molding, it had chamfered corners. Instead of coming to a point, each corner had a two-foot flat surface, which made it easy to create a diamond. Even better, there were fences across the street facing the corner. This made it possible to hit home runs over the fence. This configuration also made it possible to have a wider field that could handle more than one fielder and even to create bases so that we could play with runners rather than counting bounces.

The corner configuration also made it possible to hit straight away or to pull the ball by hitting the point at an angle. Hitting to the opposite field was tougher because it could result in hitting yourself with the ball. (You have to picture what this would entail.) The trick was to essentially run across the flat corner and throw the ball back across your body toward the point so that it took off behind you. When properly executed, it was a moment of rare grace and beauty—but usually it was an exercise in humiliation.

We were so serious about this game that we created permanent scoreboards. The asphalt softened enough on sunny days that we were able to carve a scoreboard into the street. We’d record the score in the boxes with chalk and wash it away after the game. We also kept track of home runs. One year I was contending for the lead at the end of the school term with 25 or so dingers. But my parents had rented a summer place, and I couldn’t play for two months. While I was away, those who stayed behind were free to play all day. When I returned, my main competitor was approaching 300.The people who lived in the building, especially in the ground floor apartments, did not appreciate our games. They convinced the building superintendent to spread rough concrete over our beautiful, sharp-edged point, but the tactic did not succeed. The rough and uneven surface only made the game more challenging and interesting because now we could create surprising angles by aiming for particular spots.

A game played at the intersection of West 184th Street and Park Avenue in New York City, as recalled by Gregory Christiano. A player would slam the ball into a painted square on a concrete median barrier, and it would rebound onto Park Avenue, then still paved with cobblestones. The player would then try to reach the first base (an open sewer) before a fielder could field it and throw to the baseman there. There were two sewer-bases and home in this game.

A game played in Romania, reportedly traced back to a shepherd’s game, played in southern Romania from the year 1310. The game is described as involving two 11-player teams that alternate batting as in a one-innings game of cricket. The pitch is a soft toss from a teammate.

One 1990 report says that there are nine (fielder's?) bases set out over 120 yards, that the defensive team can score on tagging and plugging putouts, and that there were over 1500 teams throughout Romania, mostly in rural areas. That account describes a ball the size of a baseball and a bat resembling a cricket bat. A second report from 1973 describes the ball as small, and the bat only a little thicker than a billiard cue, and that if a runner deflects a thrown ball with the palms, he is not put out. Note: Protoball’s initial evidence on oina came from the two western news accounts provided in the Hall of Fame’s “Origins of Baseball” file (cited below).

2017 Input: In early 2017 we viewed a handful of Youtube videos (only one of which was in English), and we office the following rough impressions of the game. Most were discovered by John Thorn, and they depict mature players.

The most interesting feature, to a baseball fan, is that oina has found a way to preserve plugging (you may know it as burning, soaking, etc.) as a way to retire runners. This appears to be handled by requiring fielders to throw at runners from a few specific spots, so that runners at risk can remain at some distance. They resemble dodgeball players in their attempted evasions, but if they deflect a ball with the palms of their hands, they remain immune.

The detailed rules for scoring remain non-obvious.

In the available clips, we did not see outs made when fly balls were caught. There are foul lines for hit balls.

Baserunners appear to be restricted to the far end-line when a new batter bats. Two or more baserunners may occupy that station, according to rules that are hard to fathom at this point.

Pitches are very soft short lobs, none appearing to soar much above the batter's head. Servers must smartly step away to avoid the lustily swung bat.

[This source states that oina became the national sport officially in 2014, but is endangered today and is "almost forgotten," with only 25 village clubs active. It also claims that the sport has been documented in the 1300s. The sport was declared compulsory in Romanian schools in 1897.]

Several Youtube videos describe Oina (if you find others, let us know). Most of the following were scouted out by John Thorn, and submitted in an email to Protoball on 1/19/2017:

The game was played as late as the 1940 by the Mi-kmaq tribe in eastern Canada. "Old-fashion preserved an intriguing number of remnantsof ball-games of the pre-Knickerbocker era,including no foul ground, one out per inning, soaking (plugging), and soft, hnome-made balls." The rules were reported to be flexible.

per Culin. A non-team variety of base ball entailing fly outs and four bases and a three-strike rule, but no plugging. Players rotate through a series of fielding positions with each out, until they become one of two batters. “An ordinary base-ball bat is used.”

This game[141] is described as a reduced form of softball with no running (ghost runners determine when runs score) and soft tossing by a team-mate as pitching. Fair ground is defines by an acute angle much smaller than 90 degrees, and a line is drawn about 20 yards from home. Three or four players make up a team. Balls hit past the line and not caught on the fly are counted as singles, unless they pass the deepest fielder. A bobbled grounder is counted as Reached on Error. The game is played as a beach game in the San Diego area[142]. Pitches are gentle lobs. Peter Morris writes that this game is an offshoot of softball.

A Polish game. Chetwynd (2008) notes that Palant, similar to baseball, had a long history. “Poland had played its own traditional bat-and-ball game - particularly in the areas of Upper Silesia and the Opole District - dating back centuries and, by the 1920s, the game of Palant had a popular following.”

A Polish website describes Palant as using a rectangular field of about 25 yards by 50 yards, being governed by a clock, and having a provision by which, if a runner is hit, his teammates can enter play and retain their ups by plugging a member of the fielding team. David Block identifies Palant [Pilka Palantowa] as the Silesian game played in Jamestown VA in 1609 by a small group of Polish craftsmen.

Polish play is now reportedly resticted to rural areas.

Sources:

Josh Chetwynd, Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History (McFarland, 2008). page 219.

Patch Baseball is evidently name for a form of baseball that allows the plugging of runners. We find the term used in upstate New York in about 1850. "Patching" is another word for "plugging" or "burning" baserunners.

Sources:

See Protoball Chronology item 1850c.17.Thanks to Skip McAfee for explaining the term.

Described as akin to Pepper, this bat-control game involved hitting lobbed pitches toward a fence featuring extra-base zones. Cleanly-fielded balls, wide hits, and hits over the fence were outs. Baserunning is not part of this game.

This game, similar to the game known in other locations at strike-out, involved the use of plastic golf-ball-sized balls and regular baseball bats.

A batter stands before a wall marked with a strike zone and attempts to hit pitched PeeGee balls. Balls hit to particular zones are counted as singles, doubles, etc., and imaginary runners advance to score runs. There is no live baserunning or fielding in this pastime.

(Cat’s Pellet, Cat’s Pallet, Gidigadie) - per MacLagan (1905). This game is played like Tip-Cat, but with a ball and a one-handed bat, and with plugging instead of crossing to put runners out. An Orkney game. Elsewhere MacLagan described the game as using four small holes in a twelve-foot square. An 1882 source finds a usage of “cat’s pellet” in 1648, and defines it as “a game, perhaps the same as tip-cat.” Court records from 1583 seem to indication that the game “Cat’s Pallet” was also called Gidigadie, at least in the Manchester area.

A picture in the W. W. Grantham collection at Lewes, England, shows a game seeming to resemble stoolball, but with wickets that look like round targets, held up by a post on either side of the 'target.' The bats are like smaller stoolball bats.

A photographic image of a game in progress can be found with Google search of <"joshua biltcliffe" "ladies cricket">.

There is no firm indication, at this point, of the time period of the geographic area of play. The photograph was taken in Penistone, in southern Yorkshire. Penistone is about 80 miles north of Birmingham.

A drill to sharpen the batting eye and fielding reflexes in baseball. A few players stand side by side in a line and toss the ball to a batter who hits short grounders to them in turn. Forms of the game involve penalizing players for fielding errors and mis-hits. There is no running and no team play in this exercise.

A lifelong baseball man Reflected on the game of pepper. "Another problem [with today's practices] is the absence of pepper games. I had a discussion once with Ted Williams, ans we both agreed that playing pepper was important in the conditioning of every player. Every movement that you make in a pepper game, whether you're swinging a bat or fielding the ball or throwing the ball or whatever, you would use in a professional baseball game. . . . But pepper games are gone. . . . It would still be worth putting every player through a pepper session every day."

Pesapallo is “Finnish Baseball.” This invented game is based on American baseball, and on the traditional Finnish games kuningaspallo, pitkapallo, and poltopallo, and was introduced in 1922. Some call it Finland’s national game.

Pesapallo involves two 9-player teams, pitching via vertical toss from close to the batter, a zigzag basepath of progressive length [about 65 feet from home to first, about 150 feet from third to home], optional running with fewer than two strikes, a three-out-side-out rule, runners being either “put out” or “wounded” (thus not counted as an out, and allowed to bat again), no ground-rule home runs, and four-inning games.

Nations with sizable Finnish emigrants (Sweden, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) compete in the annual world cup of Pesapallo.

Called an “advanced form” of German Bat Ball, this game involves three bases for runners instead of one, and runners can remain at a base if they believe they cannot safely advance further. Runners can tag up after caught flies. Otherwise, the rules of German Bat Ball apply.

Sources:

Emily Elmore and M. O’Shea, A Practical Handbook of Games (Macmillan, New York, 1922), pages 93-95.

The game that arose in Philadelphia in the 1830’s. The rules of this game have recently been induced from game accounts by Richard Hershberger. The game is distinct from the Massachusetts Game. It’s signature features were 11-player teams, an absence of set defensive positions, stakes [as bases] set in a circle 30-foot diameter, non-aggressive pitching, a lighter, softer ball, an all-out-side-out rule, and a bound rule.

This game was evidently the game of choice in the Philadelphia area until about 1860, when the New York game came to dominate Philly play.

A game - evidently evolved uniquely by Bob Boynton -- with two players, a field marked with zones for singles, doubles, etc., and employing a ping-pong ball thrown from 33 feet to a batter standing at a home plate of 12 inches square. Bats were the size of broomsticks with toweling for padding. There was some fielding but all “baserunning” used only imaginary runners.

Gregory Christiano recalls this urban game as being a derivative on Stickball for two or more players. A square painted on a building was the strike zone. A batter used a broomstick to hit a pitched spaldeen ball across the street, where the height at which the ball hit a wall across the street determined the degree of base advancement. This game resembles Strike-Out.

a game defined in the OED as “a game similar to Rounders in which a ball is hit with the flat of the hand.” The game is mainly associated with the English North Country, and is said to feature three or four ‘tuts,’ or stopping-places. The first cited use appeared in 1796. Gomme (page 45) adds that if the batter-runner is hit before reaching on of the “tuts” he is “said to be burnt, or out.

This game is modification of cricket evidently designed to expedite play, and is played at several English schools. Batters must run when they make contact with a bowled ball. Bowled balls can not hit the ground in front of the wicket, and a baseball bat is used instead of a flat cricket bat.

According to an 1810 text, “La Ball Empoisonée” was a game for two teams of eight to ten boys involving repelling the ball (presumably by hitting it by the palm of the hand) and running to bases trying to avoid being plugged.

Porschek resembles trapball, but uses a four-inch wooden cat in place of a ball. A batter lofts the stick, and then hits it into the field of play. The fielding side can attain the batting side by catching the hit projectile or by picking up an uncaught ball and throwing it to hit the bat, which is dropped by the batter.

Batters are not described as runners. We are unsure when this game was played, and if it persists today.

This is a variation of baseball in which a rubber ball is punched, and not hit with a bat, to start a play. One set of modern rules is at http://www.spaldeen.com/punchball.html. Johnson (1910) lists Punch Ball under “Baseball games.” An urban form of this game is recalled by Gregory Christiano.

A brief 4/30/1989 letter to the New York Times argued that stickball was a "sissyfied" sport in comparison to punchball. "We played with six or seven players, nickel a player. We had one-sewer homers and two-sewer homers. The game was so popular in Brooklyn that a daily newspaper, The Graphic, sponsored a punchball tournament, pitting one street against another." The players used a spaldeen, and chalked in foul lines and first and third bases.

per Culin. (Elsewhere Roly Poly, Roll Ball, Roley Holey.) Each player defends a hole (or hat). If another player rolls a “medium-sized” rubber ball into the hole, he tries to hit another player with it to prevent having a count made against him.

McCurdy (1911) lists this game, along with Old Cat and Fungo, as minor forms of bat-and-ball. One might speculate that it is a non-team game like Scrub and Move-Up, in which players rotate among positions on the field as outs are made.

This appears to be the name given to the game played in Massachusetts . . . and possibly beyond that . . . in the years before the Dedham rules of 1858 created the Massachusetts Game.

We have about a dozen references to round ball from about 1780 to 1856 -- all in the state of Massachusetts. New England also has references to goal, or goal ball, base, or base ball, and bat-and-ball forf this period. There is no indication if or how these games differed, or whether they are direct antecedents of the Mass Game rules of 1858.

Round Cat is a game noted by Tom Altherr in September 2009. We find several brief mentions of this game being played from Washington DC southward, but no explanation of how it was played. One account identifies it as similar to Scrub as played in New England.

[A] As played in Eastern PA in the 1850s, Round Town is recalled as having four or five bases or “safety spots,” tagging instead of plugging, the fly rule, the sharing of bases by multiple runners, and a bat made of a rail or clap-board. A game “similar to baseball” recalled as being played by school boys in 1891 in a grove of trees in Beech Grove, Kentucky.

---

[B] Another game called Round Town is described as follows:

An Old Virginia Ball Game

Mount Crawford, a town in Rockingham County, Va., was the scene of a novel ball game on, January 13 last, the occasion being a contest at the old Virginia game of ball known as "Round Town, " the weather being unusually mild for winter.

This game is well understood and is much enjoyed by every country boy, though only a very few of their city cousins know the first rudiments of it.

Forty-four men and boys were engaged in the game mentioned above, and they were the best throwers, surest catchers, and hardest strikers of the two neighborhoods. A large sized crowd watched with unabating interest the movements of the game.

The game of round-town is played in this manner: Two sides are formed, the number of players of the division being equal. Four bases are used and are placed in the same manner as if they were being fixed for a game of baseball, although men are only placed in the positions of the pitcher, catcher, and first baseman, the rest of the players being scattered in the field where they think the ball is most apt to be knocked. The first batsman on the opposing side takes his place at the plate, and he has in his hand a paddle an inch or two thick, and in which only one hand is used ins striking. The pitcher delivers a solid gum ball with all the swiftness attainable, the use of the curve never being thought of, and it is therefore very seldom that a "strike out" occurs. The batter hits the ball at the first opportunity and endeavors to drive it over the heads of the opponents, for if it is caught on the fly or the first bound the runner is called out, and also if it is begotten to the first baseman before the runner arrives at the base. Should the runner reach first base safely he can continue to run to the other bases if he wishes, but his opponents have the privilege of hitting him with the ball, and as it is very painful to be struck with a gum ball, the runner is very cautious, and if he is struck he is counted out of the game, although should he reach any of the other bases he is safe.

Another batsman appears and if he makes a safe hit with the ball the runners can continue to move until stopped from fear of being hit with the ball. In case a man is on second base and a ball is knocked and caught on the fly or first bound, the runner must stay at the base until the ball is returned to the pitcher. Each side has only one inning and that continues until every man has made out: therefore if a man makes an out at the first time at the bat he is disqualified to play until all on his side have done likewise, then they take the field. If a player makes the circuit safely it is called a run.

The result of the contest was the success of the Mt. Crawford twenty-two by a score of 104 runs to 90, the contest occupying the whole afternoon.

---

[C] In February 2016, Bill Hicklin adds:

I found two references to Virginia "round-town," both from Dickinson County, Virginia (in the Appalachian coal country). They come from School and Community History of Dickenson County, Virginia (ed. Dennis Reedy), a compilation of articles published over many years in the local paper, which were themselves based on a series of oral-history interviews conducted at the behest of the school superintendant with senior and retired Dickenson teachers.

[1] William Ayers Dyer: "I was born May 10, 1880 at Stratton, Dickenson County, Virginia and started to school to Johnson Skeen at the Buffalo School in 1885 when I was 5 years old... The games we played at the Buffalo were straight town, round town, base, bull pen and antnee over." (Bull pen was dodgeball, but played with a baseball. Ouch!)

[2]Hampton Osborne (b. 1894): "'Round-town' and 'straight-town' were popular games. Round-town had four bases in a circle, as baseball does today. If the batter was caught or crossed-off both ways, he was out. Straight-town had four bases in a row and you used the same rules as round-town.

Sources:

[A] J. Lambert and H. Reinhard, A History of Catasaqua in Lehigh County (Searle and Dressler, Allentown, 1914), page 364.

Rounders was first described in the late 1820s. Current researchers believe that the game was similar to English base ball, which had been described almost 80 years earlier, but it is clearer that rounders employed a bat than that English ball did.

Rounders in the 19th Century generally resembled the game that Mass game; it used overhand throwing, plugging, etc.

In describing rounders in 1898, Gomme notes a one-out-side-out rule applied for caught (fly?) balls. Batters who missed three pitches were compelled to run on the third swing as if they had struck the ball.

Rounders is now played in British schools, often by young women.

Sources:

The earliest reference to English rounders is in Clarke, W., Boy’s Own Book (London, Vizetelly Branston, 1828, second edition.

This game resembles contemporary British rounders. The bases form a regular pentagon, a pitcher stands at its center, fly balls are outs, and there is plugging. A baserunner, however, could make plays on subsequent batter-runners as a member of the fielding team.

per Brewster. Baseball modified for small groups. Players count off, the first two or three becoming batters, the next the pitcher, the next the catcher, the next first base, etc. For most outs, the retired player goes to the last fielding position, and others move up one position, the pitcher becoming a batter. For fly outs, the batter and the successful fielder exchange places. The game is not notably different from Scrub and Workup.

In his definition of Rounders, Hazlitt suggests that “it is possible that this is the game which, under the name of rownes (rounds) is mentioned in the ‘English Courtier and the Country Gentleman,’ in 1586.”

Sources:

W. Carew Hazlitt, Faiths and Folklore: A Dictionary of National Beliefs, Superstitions and Popular Customs(London: Reeves and Turner, 1905)., page 527.

A name given in some localities, evidently, to the game played in the Boston area in the early 19th century; it is possibly another name for what is elsewhere in New England recalled as Round Ball. Our single reference to this game comes from a letter written in 1905 by a Boston man.

Sources:

See Protoball Chronology item #1855c.1.The letter was written to the Mills Commission, which was examining the origins of American baseball.

"In Brooklyn in the early 1960s, we played a game called "Running Bases". It was played similar to Peter [Mancuso]'s [account of] Base, except a rubber ball (Spaulding or Pennsy Pinky) was thrown between a person on each side who had to tag you with the ball. Rundowns, as in baseball, were the norm. No score was kept to my recollection."

"RUSHING BASES. Draw two bases, with a wide space between them. All the players then station themselves in one base, except one boy, to be ' and King Caesar,' by choice or otherwise, and he places himself midway between the bases. The men then attempt to run from one base to the other, and the King strives the catch them; and whenever he takes one, he claps him on the head and cries thrice, 'Crown thee, King Caesar!' and he must thenceforth assist his Majesty in catching the rest of the men, each of whom must, as he is taken, join the royal party; the last man captured being King for the next game. The crowning must be distinctly pronounced thrice, else the captive can be demanded buy his party."

Sources:

"Uncle John," The Boy's Book of Sports and Games (Geo. Appleton, Philadelphia), 1851.

A longball variant still played in Germany. “German Schlagball (‘hit the ball’) is similar to rounders.” No other clues to schlagball are provided.

Other unverified sources state that schlagball evolve as early as the 1500s.

The game certainly features pitching and hitting. An early form was described by Gutsmuths as the German Ballgame (Deutsche Ballspiel). Rules can be found here. One write-up compares schlagball to lapta stating that while the running base in lapta is a line, in schlagball runners proceed along a series of discrete bases; this is a misapprehension. In modern Schlagball the goal line is replaced with two side-by-side "touch posts," either one of which may serve as the running base.

Sources:

Endrei, W., and Laszlo Zolnay, Fun and Games in Old Europe. Budapest, (Corvina Klado, 1986).

Another label for the game Workup and Move-Up: The available number of players is initially divided between several defensive positions and a smaller number of batters. If a batter is put out, he/she becomes the fielder who is last in line to return to batting, and must work the way back position by position. A fielder to catches a fly ball exchanges places immediately with the batter. Because the small number of player precludes team play, “ghost runners” and special ground rules are sometimes required. Plugging is allowed, at least when the ball is soft enough to permit that. Once called Ins and Withs in the Philadelphia area.

Single-wicket cricket uses teams smaller than the usual 11-player teams. All bowling is to a single wicket.

There is, in effect, a foul ground behind the wicket, so unlike full-team cricket, only balls hit forward are deemed to be in play.

As late at 1969 there were annual single-wicket championships at Lord’s in London. In the very early years, most cricket is believed to use a single wicket, and each references to cricket in the US usually reported very small numbers of players. Early cricket rules called for single-wicket play when team sizes were five or fewer.

A 2009 article reports on a game played mostly in Chicago involving a ball of 16” circumference and using no gloves. No other variations are covered. The article is not clear on the local name for the game, but another account calls the large ball a “clincher,” and notes that games were sometimes played in the street. (Note: Line Ball, another Chicago game, also used a large ball.) It appears that the game generally follows the rules of softball.

Query: Can you supply further details about this game?

Sources:

M. Davey, “Gloveless Players Hold on to Softball Dream,” New York Times, 9/18/09.

Writing in volume 5, no. 4 (April 2012) of Originals, Tom Altherr notes that a 1900 source on schoolyard games noted "The game of Flip Up or Sky-Ball is still played by smaller children, and sometimes by large ones (especially girls). It is often played by as many as a dozen players and is here known as "Tip-Up," or "Tippy-Up." The 1900 source is D. C. Gibson, "Play Ball," Mind and Body: A Monthly Journal,Volume 7, no 73 (March 1900), page 7. No rules for this game is given.

"Slapball. The game is similar to Stickball but there are fewer players, no teams, pitchers, or strike zones, and the ball is slapped instead of hit by a stick or bat. It is usually played when there are not enough players aaround fjor a game of Stickball.

Players: Three to five.

Supplies: Pinky Ball, four bases or chalk.

Object: To slap the ball hard and far enough to run around all the bases without being tagged or forces out at a base.

To play: All the players except the hitter are out in the field or covering the bases. The hitter throws the ball up, fungo-style, slaps the ball in mid-air with the palm of her hand, and runs around the bases."

If the batter completes the circuit, she is given a run and bats again. If put out, she takes the last field position and rotates until having another batting turn.

"Variation: Punchball. In this game, the hitter throws the ball fungo style and punches it instead of slapping it with her hand."

Maigaard (1941) lists this game. It varies from other regional variations in placing the batting area mid-way between the home area and the first of two "resting areas" for runners. It is possible that this represents a form of Palant.

Hall-of-Famer Cap Anson recalls that "'soak ball' was at this time [as an Iowa schoolboy in the early 1860's] my favorite sport. It was a game in which the batter was put out by running the bases by being hit with the ball," which was "comparatively soft." Patch baseball was, arguably, another name for this game.

"There were no bats, no nything except a lot of boys, as a ball with which they were trying to hit one another. But if one threw and missed, or his ball was caught, he was out. When all but one, or an agreed number, were out, the game was ended."

Thus, "sockball" seems to have been a game we might now call dodgeball.

An 1887 source reporting that Rounders was still being played in some Southern and Western states, also noted that the game was called Sockey in some states. Our only reference to Sockey is in an 1888 recollection of ballplaying at a PA school, and notes that this game was played against the wall of a stable.

As described in Bealle, Softball evolved from Indoor Baseball, which was first played in 1887. Softball rules are close to Baseball rules, but the infield dimensions were set to be smaller and the ball is pitched with an underhand motion. A full team has ten players. Many forms are played, depending on the age and agility of the players. The term Softball debuted in 1926.

per MacLagan. The Uist form of Pellet. A horse-hair ball is put in play with a trap, and the batter attempt to hit it with a bat. Outs are attained by caught fly balls, three missed swings, throwing the ball into the hole at home, and plugging runners between two calaichean (harbors). Points are scored by measuring the lengths of hits in bat-lengths.

per Leavy. A biography of Sandy Koufax reports that he played “stickball, punchball, square ball, and Gi-Gi ball in his neighborhood. In one 1922 handbook, Square Ball appears to be a variant of Corner Ball in which the peripheral plugging team and the central target team are equal in number, and is which the ball, after hitting a player on the target team, can be retrieved, “Halt!” called, and the ball thrown at “frozen” members of the peripheral team.

A game usually played in urban streets. The ball is rubber -- a “spaldeen,” now virtually the same that used in racketball, and bats vary but include broom handles. Allowances are made for traffic of various sorts, and the bases are specified at the start of play. (Verification needed.) One variation of the game is found in a recollection of New York play by Gregory Christiano.

According to Gomme (1898), stones was a game played in Ireland in about 1850, using either a ball or a lob-stick. A circle of about a half-dozen stones is arranged, one for each player on the in team. A member of the out team throws the ball/stick at the stones in succession. If the defending player hits it away, all members of the out team must move to another stone. The in and out teams exchange places if a stone is hit by the thrower, the ball/stick is caught, or a player is hit while running between stones.

There was a distinct form of cricket at the Roman Catholic College of Stonyhurst. The game played there used a single-wicket, which took the shape of a 17-inch milestone, used a misshapen hand-crafted ball with an exaggerated seams, encouraged bowling with two or more bounces before reaching the batsman, used"baselines" set at 30 yards instead if 22-yards, and 3 to 5 players per side. There was an out-of-bounds line.

The college was located outside England from about 1600 to 1794, and tre conjecture is that this game evolved separately from the dominant 11-man game during that period.

Stoolball(England (in the past century, predominantly in Sussex and other south east counties))

Stoolball’s first appearance was in the 1600’s; there are many more references to stoolball than to cricket in these early years.

Believed to have originated as a game played by English milkmaids using a milking stool set on its side as a pitching target, stoolball evolved to include the use of bats instead of bare hands and running among goals.

The modern form of the is actively played in counties in the south east of England, and uses an opposing pair of square targets set well off the ground as goals, and heavy paddles as bats. Since 2010, the game has experienced a renaissance, and now has active youth programs, a season-ending All-England match of prominent players, and the expansion of mixed-gender play. (The ancient game was played by women and men, but in recent years most players and have been women.)

McCray suggests that before 1800, there is no clear evidence that stoolball involved baserunning.

"Stoopball originated in dense urban areas like New York, where children often lacked the space to play baseball. Rules varied based on the neighborhood, block, or building, but the idea was always the same: A “batter” would fire a ball (in New York, the kids used pink balls they called “Spaldeens”) against the steps of an apartment building, with thenumber of bases contingent on distance the ricochet traveled."

The game is called "largely extinct" since World War II.

Sources:

Louie Lazar, "If You Build A Stoop, They will Come: Wisconsin's Stoopball League of America," at Grantland.com., accessed July 23, 2013. Try a <Wisconsin's stoopball league> search.

This article features an account of a league operating in 2013, and the 29th World Championship played on a dedicated field and drawing hundred to be part of the festivities.

[William Ayers Dyer essay:] "I was born May 10, 1880 at Stratton, Dickenson County, Virginia and started to school to Johnson Skeen at the Buffalo School in 1885 when I was 5 years old... The games we played at the Buffalo were straight town, round town, base, bull pen and antnee over." (Bull pen was dodgeball, but played with a baseball. Ouch!)

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[Hampton Osborne (b. 1894) essay:] "'Round-town' and 'straight-town' were popular games. Round-town had four bases in a circle, as baseball does today. If the batter was caught or crossed-off both ways, he was out. Straight-town had four bases in a row and you used the same rules as round-town."There were three or four base games, but 'Stink-base' was the most popular..." (describes game effectively identical to prisoner's base, which we take to be a form of capture-the-flag)=

Sources:

Dennis Reedy, ed., School and Community History of Dickenson County, Virginia

A fungo-style game for two teams as shown in an 1863 handbook. A feeder throws the ball to a batter, who hits it as far as possible. A member of the out-team picks up that ball and bowls it toward the bat, which lies on the ground. If the ball hits or hops over the bat, the batsman is out. The batsman is also out with three missed swings.

This game is most often seen as a schoolyard game with from two to five players. A strike zone is drawn on a suitable wall, and a batter stands before it, attempting to hit a tennis ball, a rubber ball or another type of projectile. Baserunning is not usual. All other rules - for base advancement by imaginary runners, changing of batters, etc., seem flexible to circumstance. (Verification needed.)

As of Fall 2013, it is our preliminary impression that there are several local variants of strike-out, the name used in Central New York, and we group them together here under that name; they include PeeGee ball and Indian Ball.

This game is mentioned, along with Norwegian Ball in a 1908 book on North Dakota folkways. Said to be taught to local children by Swedish newcomers and a Swedish teacher, the game is only depicted as being “played somewhat like ‘one old cat.’” It seems conceivable that this game is related to Brannboll. Maigaard (1941) lists two Swedish variants for Long Ball.

Target Ball appears to have strongly resembled stoolball, and thus cricket. An illustration in its rulebook shows a paddle-shaped bat, a round "target" not much larger than the bat, and a ball marked like a tennis ball or double-eight-sewed stoolball.

"Target Ball supplies the need so much felt in girls' schools of a summer game which will take the place that cricket does in boys' schools."

Modern stoolball uses rectangular wicket separated by 16 yards, but no other differences from target ball are yet known.

Sources:

M. Alexander Hughes, The Rules of Target Ball (F. H. Ayres Ltd., undated). A palm-sized 7-page booklet, held in the W. W. Grantham Collection, Lewes, England. From its location in the Collection, Target Ball may have been played in the late 19th, and in the first half of the 20th centuries.

Matthew McDowell at the University of Edinburgh reports finding evidence of targette being play in the 1890s on the Scottish island of Bute.

The rules of this game, popular among girls at Rothesay Academy there, are not yet known, but from coverage in the school magazine, it bore a resemblance to cricket: "there are first and second innings, the game is scored in runs, the bowlers attempt to claim wickets off of the batters." The magazine further boasted, "The Targette Club is a leviathan among clubs. Did you ever hear of a school football club with 80 members in it?" McDowell finds indication that former students and members of the community also participated.

Rothesay is about 30 miles west of Glasgow and just off the mainland of Scotland. Its current population is about 6,500.

A description of Spier's School in North Ayrshire, Scotland mentions, cryptically, that "a quaint game called targette was played in the early days." Accessed 2/7/2014.The school is also on the Firth of Clyde in westernmost Scotland.

A game they evidently knew as "base ball" was played by the students of the Union Hall Academy in Jamaica (Queens County, NY) well before the New York game began its spread in the mid 1850s.

Two students (Mills and Cogswell) who played the game in the early 1850s exchanged letters about it in 1905, both of them early members of the Knickerbocker Club. (Excerpts are provided by John Thorn below.) The letters reveal these remembered features:

A third Union Hall student was William Wheaton (born 1814), who would have been at the school several years before Mills and Cogswell. Wheaton recalled that in 1837, as a member of the Gotham Club at age 22 or 23, the Gotham "decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game," and started by eliminating plugging.

Thus, it seems plausible that the game played at Union Hall may have been a form of three-old-cat, perhaps evolving over time. By 1850, of course, the Knickerbockers were playing intramural games elsewhere in New York.

It also seems possible that foul ground was a Union Hall innovation prior to the formation of the Gotham Club in 1837.

Sources:

On Mills and Cogswell letters: John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pages 27 and 28.

On the 1887 Wheaton article in the San Francisco Examiner: Randall Brown, How Baseball Began, National Pastime, number 24 (2004), pages 52-54.

A "National 3 Man Ball League and Baseball Tournament" was announced in March 2013, to take place n Miami in April 2013.

In this game, hitters swing at underhand deliveries (from a teammate) and try to hit the (undefined) ball into a fairly narrow pizza-slice-shaped fair territory such that it is not caught by the three fielders playing defense for the opposing club. Shorter "hits" are counted as singles, longer ones doubles and triples, and hits passing the 360-foot outer boundary are home runs.

The game uses imaginary base-runners who normally advance only one base at a time. An unusual feature of this game is that after three home runs are achieved, additional hits beyond the end-line are registered as outs. Games take 45 minutes, or an unclear number of innings.

Craig Waff came across an 1894 reference to Three-Base Ball as having been played at Erasmus Hall, a school in Brooklyn. The game, reported as being playing circa 1840, involved vigorous plugging and while its rules are not further described, its playing positions suggest base ball. Two-Old-Cat is described separately in the 1894 article.

Sources:

Posted to the 19CBB listserve on May 13, 2007 by Craig B. Waff. Craig cites the source as “Sports in Old Brooklyn: Colonel John Oakley Tells of the Games of His Boyhood: How Some Well-Known Men Amused Themselves in Bygone Days – Duck-on-the-Rock, Three Base Ball and Two Old Cat Good Enough for Them,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Volume 54, number 292 (Sunday, October 21, 1894), page 21, columns 4-5.

"Three-Corner Cat" is the name of a game recalled decades later by base ball founder William R. Wheaton, as having been played at a Brooklyn school in his youth. See http://protoball.org/1849c.4 for a chronology entry on this game.

Three-cornered cat was a boys' game, and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball was thrown to put out a man between bases, and it had to hit the runner to put him out."

As is indicated in the 1849c.4 entry, the rules of this game, as recalled in 1905, were something of a hybrid between three old cat and modern baseball. Wheaton, who later had the job of writing new rules for the Gotham club, which were apparently a primary basis for the famous Knickerbocker rules of 1845.

Sources:

"How Baseball Began: A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It," San Francisco Examiner (date?), 1887. Wheaton's role in early base ball is related in John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 36-42. See also Randall Brown, "How Baseball Began," National Pastime, volume 24 (2004), pages 51-54.

Block discusses whether Thèque belongs on the list of baseball’s predecessors. Thèque is an old Norman game, but there are evidently few descriptions of the game before baseball and rounders appeared. He cites an 1899 depiction of the game that shows five bases, plugging, and the pitcher belonging to the in-team, but otherwise resembles baseball and rounders. Block concludes that there is insufficient evidence to say whether Thèque came before or after the English counterpart game.

Sources:

Block, David, Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2005)., pages 147-148.

Strutt (1801) says there were various versions of Tip-Cat, and describes two of them. The first is basically a fungo game: a batter stands at the center of a circle and hits the cat a prescribed distance. Failing that, another player replaces him. (A similar version appears in The Boy’s Handy Book, but adds the feature that the fielding player tries to return the cat to the hitter’s circle such that the hitter does not hit it away again.)

In a second version, holes are made in a regular circle, and each is defended by an in-team player. The players advance after the cat is hit away by one of them, but they can be put out if a cat crosses them - that is, it passes between them and the next hole. Gomme (1898) notes that in some places runners are put out be being hit with the cat, and three misses makes an out. She adds that Tip-Cat was “once commonly played in London streets, now forbidden.” Writing in 1864, Dick noted that Tip-Cat was only rarely being played in the U.S. In 1896, however, Beard was experiencing a revival in the US, Germany, Italy, “and even in Hindostand,” whereas in about 1850 it had been confined to “rustics on England.” Richardson (1848) notes Tip-Cat’s resemblance to Single-Wicket Cricket. “Twenty-one [runs] is usually a game,” he adds. The earliest reference to a cat-stick we have is the 1775 report that a witness to the Boston Massacre carried a cat-stick with him.

Sources:

Joseph Strutt, The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England—a New Edition, Much Enlarged and Corrected by J. Charles Fox (????? (Reissued by Singing Tree Press, Detroit, 1968), 1903)., pages 109-110

Dick, ed., Dick and Fitzgerald, the American Boys Book of Sports and Games: A Practical Guide to Indoor and Outdoor Amusements (Lyons Press Reprint, 2000). Originally Published in 1864., pages 117-118.

D. C. Beard, The American Boy’s Book of Sport (Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1896), page 332.

Only framentary information is as yet known about Tire-Ball. The game takes its name from the length of bicycle tube that served as the game's ball (later, a short section of garden hose filled that need more often. Other rules are unclear to us at this point.

The English version of a (Syrian?) website includes the following text under the heading "Top Degenegi:"

"Top Degenegi was similar to the American game of baseball. To play, one needed a thick bat and a ball, which was usually made using bits of rag tied together with colorful string. Two teams are formed, and they stand at a distance from one another. Like in baseball, one team pitches and the other bats. The batter has to hit the ball back in the direction of the pitching team, whose members must then try to catch the ball before it hits the ground."

Sources:

This text is found on the houshamadyan.org website as of 6/6/2017. A search for <top degenegi ourfa> returns the site.

There appear to be two distinct games that have been labeled Touch-Ball. One was as a local synonym for Rounders, as recalled in an 1874 Guardian article written on the occasion of the 1874 base ball tour in England. That game was recalled as having no bats, so the ball was propelled by the players’ hands; the “touch” was the base. Writing in 1922, Sihler that in Fort Wayne IN from 1862 to 1866 (when base ball arrived) “the favorite game was ‘touch-ball,’ where “touch” referred to the plugging or tagging of runners.

Sources:

“The American Base Ball Players,” Guardian, July 31, 1874, page 5.

E. G. Sihler, “College and Seminary Life in the Olden Days,” in W. Dau., ed., Ebenezer: Reviews of the Work of the Missouri Synod During Three Quarters of a Century (Concordia Publishing, St. Louis, 1922), page 253.

Writing of the Ohio youth of a Civil War general in about 1840, Whitelaw Reid (1868) reported that “Touch-the-Base” was the favorite game, and of all who engaged in the romp, none were more eager or happy than ‘Jimmy” (the late Major-General James McPherson). We cannot be sure that this was a ball game.

Writing of the late 1860’s boyhood of a World War I General, Johnston (1919) writes that “the French boys were accustomed to play a game called tournoi, or tournament, which was something similar to the game of Rounders.” That’s all we seem to know about Tournoi.

Sources:

Charles Johnston, Famous Generals of the Great War (Page Company, Boston, 1919), page 253.

Ideas of how to understand the term “Town Ball” are still evolving. In most common usage, the term seems to have been used generically to denote, in substantially later years, any of a variety of games that preceded the New York game in a particular area. Philadelphia Town Ball, however, used the term to denote a current game before the New York game emerged, and had generally standard rules (see “Philadelphia Town Ball,” entry, above). In Cincinnati another form evolved, and there are many recollections of town ball from the South and mid-West. Town ball is not infrequently confused with the Massachusetts Game, but the term is in fact very rarely found in MA sources in the 19th century.

Trap ball is one of the earliest known ball games. Its distinguishing characteristic is the use of a “trap,” a mechanical device that, when triggered by a batter, lofts the ball to a height at which it may be struck. Most forms of trap ball do not involve running or bases; to the modern eye, it is a fungo-type game. Trap ball commonly used foul territory to define balls that were in play, where the “play” involved the catching and tossing back of the ball toward the batter. Trap ball persists today in Kent, England, as a tavern game.

An old Dutch game. Chetwynd reports that a proponent of the importation of baseball to the Netherlands in the 1910s “pitched it as an ideal summer activity. It probably helped that Grasé pointed out that baseball bore a resemblance to an ancient Dutch game, called “Tripbal,” which had been played by American colonists.” We have no other reference to this game in the US, and no indication of how it was played.

Sources:

Josh Chetwynd, Baseball in Europe: A Country by Country History (McFarland, 2008). page 14.

Gomme's compilation (1898) includes the game of Trunket, played with short sticks, and using a hole instead of wickets.

"The ball being 'cop'd', instead of bowled or trickled on the ground, it is played in he same way [as cricket]; the person striking the ball must be caught out, or the ball must be deposited in the hole before the stick or cudgel can be placed there."

This implies to Protoball that the batter runs bases after hitting the ball.

This game is a fungo game that enhances fielding skill. A batter hits a ball, fungo style, to a number of fielders. A fielder receives 7 points for a caught fly, 5 points for a ball caught on one bounce, 3 points for catching a bouncing ball, and 1 point for retrieving a ball at rest. Points are similarly lost for muffed balls. Fielders who amass 21 points become the batter. Another form of this game is [[Five Hundred]], which proceeds similarly.

Describing ballplaying in the Confederate regiments during the Civil War, Wiley suggests that “the exercise might be of the modern version, with players running four bases, or it might be two-base town ball.” It is not clear whether he means “two-base town ball” as a formal name, or simply as a way to distinguish prior folk game(s) in the South. Long Ball and Long Town used two bases.

Sources:

Bell Irvin Wiley, The Common Soldier in the Civil War(Grosset and Dunlap, New York, 1952), Book Two, “The Life of Johnny Reb,” page 159.

per Endrei and Zolnay. “We may be of the opinion that these ‘hitting’ games, which were universal in the Middle Ages, have disappeared entirely. This is far from true: in the Balkans they are still played by children . . . .” No other lead to the Balkan games is provided.

per Guarinoni. This game, reportedly played in Prague circa 1600, involved two teams, pitching, and a small leather ball “the size of a quince.” The bat was tapered and four feet long. Caught balls caused the teams to change positions. Baserunning is not mentioned, according to David Block, but is at least inferred by Endrei and Zolnay: who say that the batter “attempted to make a circuit of the bases without being hit by the ball.” Guarinoni mentions that the Poles and the Silesians were the best players.

The nature of this game is unknown. It is found an 1849 chapbook printed in Connecticut: “there are a great number of games played with balls, of which base-ball, trap ball, cricket, up-ball, catch-ball and drive-ball are the most common.”

Sources:

Juvenile Pastimes: Or, Girls’ and Boys’ Book of Sports(S. Babcock, New Haven, 1849.)

A sport that claims 1500 players among the women of Queensland, Australia, Vigoro is a souped-up version of (slightly down-sized) cricket. A key point is that if a ball Is hit forward of the crease, running is compulsory.

"A game of tip-cat. Four boys stand the corners of a large paving-stone; two have sticks, the other two are feeders, and throw the piece of wood called a 'cat.' The batters act much in he same way as in cricket, except that the cat must be hit whilst in the air. The batter hits it as far away as possible, and whilst the feeder is fetching it, gets, if possible, a run, which counts to his side. If either of the cats fall to the ground [being missed by the batter?] both batters go out, and the feeders take their place."

Wall Ball (our term -- the original Dutch source sites "Den bal tegen den muur werpen") is described in an 1845 Dutch guide to games.

A Dutch speaker's note on the game: "Wall Ball: A line is drawn on a wall about three feet high and another on the ground about six feet in front of the wall. The first player throws the ball against the ground and it has to hit the wall above the line and bounce back and hit the ground in front of the line on the ground. The second player catches it and then does the same. When a player fails to either hit the wall above the line or the ground in front of the line or the ball hits the ground a second time before he catches it, the other scores a point. The first to 15 points wins."

The earliest known game of water baseball was played in 1879 on the [Hudson?] River. Pitcher, catcher, and btter stood in waist-deep water and other players in deeper water.

A variety devised in the 1930s involved teams of six, baselines of 45 yards, balls put in play by throws from a diving board, and runner-swimmers vulnerable to being put out by plugging with the [rubber] ball.

Author Martin Johns describes Welsh baseball as having evolved from rounders, and having been re-named baseball in 1892. It has been largely confined to Cardiff and Newport, and further to the working-class sections of those towns. Sixty neighborhood clubs were playing in 1921, and five Cardiff schools formed a baseball league in 1922.

In 2015, the Welsh Baseball website at http://www.welshbaseball.co.uk/ lists eight clubs in a Premier League, several of them evidently providing summer sport for local soccer clubs.

This game uses a smaller ball than is found in US baseball, and features a flattened bat, underhand pitching, eleven-player teams, no foul ground, an all-out-side-out rule, and two-inning games.

For a history of Welsh baseball, see http://www.welshbaseball.co.uk/history/history/journal/. Included is Martin Johnes, "'Poor man's Cricket': Baseball, Class and Community in South Wales, c.1880 - 1950." International Journal of the History of Sport' volume 17, number 4 (December 2000).

George Vecsey, "Playing Baseball in Wales," New York Times, August 11 1986.

Lieutenant Ebenezer Elmer of the 3rd New Jersey Regiment referred five times to playing whirl between September 16, 1776, and 1777. The nature of play is not described, but one note may be taken to mean it was a ball game.

Numerous web searches have failed to turn up other clues about this game.

H. J Philpott used the names "hole-ball and "wibble-wobble" as games that seem consistent with hat-ball. One player would place the ball in a hole or hat, and the other players would scatter before being hit with the ball by the player designated as "it." This game thus shares evasive running and plugging with base ball.

The game of wicket was evidently the dominant game played in parts of Connecticut, western MA, and perhaps areas of Western New York State, prior to the spread of the New York game in the 1850’s and 1860’s. Wicket resembles cricket more than baseball. The “pitcher” bowls a large, heavy ball toward a long, low wicket, and a batter with a heavy curved club defends the wicket. Some students of cricket speculate that it resembles cricket before it evolved to its modern form.

A Wiffle Ball is a hollow plastic ball with holes strategically placed in order to exaggerate sideways force, and thus enabling pitchers to produce severe curves and drops. Competitive games of Wiffleball are known, some exhibiting team play. None, we believe, appear to involve baserunning.

In this game opponents position themselves on the opposite sides of as wire strung over the street. Singles, doubles, etc., are determined by whether the ball hits the wire and whether it is caught by the out team as it descends. There is no running or batting in this urban game.

Another label for the game Scrub/Move-Up: The available number of players is initially divided between several defensive positions and a smaller number of batters. A batter who is put out, becomes the fielder who is last in line to return to batting [right field, when there are enough fielders], and must work the way back position by position. A fielder to catches a fly ball exchanges places immediately with the batter. Because the small number of player precludes team play, “ghost runners” and special ground rules are sometimes required. Plugging is allowed when the ball is soft enough to permit that.

Sources:

Two examples of Work-Up are depicted in G. Land, Growing Up with Baseball (UNebraska, 2004), pages 83 and 175.